


For Whom There are No Words

by StellarRequiem



Category: Daredevil (TV), daredevil - Fandom
Genre: F/M, Slow Burn, more drama than fluff do not be fooled, partially inspired by comic Frank
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-07
Updated: 2016-08-09
Packaged: 2018-05-31 21:46:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 25
Words: 37,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6488695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StellarRequiem/pseuds/StellarRequiem
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Originally inspired by the prompt "Frank protecting Karen after Fisk finds out she killed Wesley." A dialogue-driven slow burn exploring their relationship through conversation, spaghetti dates, two incidents involving vodka, and a whole lot of back and forth between who Frank is, and what Frank does.</p><p>Originally posted on queensofthekastle.tumblr.com</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Alive

She opens her apartment door, and he’s there, waiting, in the center of the room. Probably so she’ll recognize him, and _not_ scream. Which she does. And he’s on her in an instant, a hand over her mouth, and another on her waist, pulling her into the room. He kicks the door shut behind them. He releases her as soon as it’s closed, looking ready to speak. She doesn’t give him the chance.

“Frank?! What the fuck are you doing in my apartment?”

“Easy,” he says, softly, so softly, utterly unfazed.

“No,” she snaps, “I told you we were done. You made me stand by while you _killed—_ you could have brought him to justice—”

He scoffs, almost snarls.

“So he could rule from a jail cell? Huh?”

Karen throws her hands up.

“Never mind,” she says, “I’m not having this conversation. Now get out.”

“I can’t. Not unless you’re coming with. You ever heard of some crony of that shitstain Fisk by the name of Wesley?”

Karen chokes. The tirade she’d been preparing freezes in her throat. Of course she knows Wesley. She’d shot him six times. She still sees his glazed eyes in her dreams.

“What do you know about that?” she whispers. Frank shrugs. Looks askance the way he does, with a little jerk of his chin.

“I know word is that you killed the sonofabitch, and Fisk wants your head on a platter. You need to come with me, it’s not safe here.”

Karen can barely hear him. She shakes her head again. And again.

“You aren’t going to ask if I did it?”

“Would it matter if you did? Come on, we need to go.”

But Karen has fallen back, onto her bed. The covers feel foreign under her hands, as if they were made of something unreal, hazy. As if she were unreal. As if reality were nothing bust mist that she’s trapped, floating through in directionless circles. _It’s never going away, is it?_

“Go where?” she hears herself asking. Frank sighs, desperate to get her somewhere else.

“Your devil friend has connections with the cops. You march in there? They’ll laugh at you. He does, and they’ll be all over you. Protective custody. I’m taking you to him.”

Karen snaps her head up.

“You can’t,” she says. “He’s—under the mask—”

“Your lawyer boyfriend. I know.”

“Not anymore,” she mutters. Frank’s eyes narrow.

“You let go,” he says. There’s no judgement in the statement, though it cuts straight through Karen all the same.

“That’s none of your damn business,” she snaps. “The point is, I can’t go to him. Matt’s apartment is one of the first places they,” _whoever ‘they’ are, at this point,_ “will look for me.”

Frank grunts.

“Well,” he says, “then I guess you’re coming with me.”

**

“Cots over there,” he tells her, waving a hand at a meager, army issue sort of raised mattress that reminds her in some ways of a hammock as much as a bed, “it’s all yours.”

“How long will this take?” she demands.

“Don’t know,” he replies, with a barely-shrug, a kind of twitch in his shoulders, “I gotta find out who’s after you and what they know. Then I’ll see if I can’t catch Red myself.”

“Red?”

“Your devil.” _He’s not my devil._ “Stay here. Help yourself to what’s in the fridge, and don’t mind Blue,” he gestures again to the large pit-bull that had startled her when she came in, “he’s friendly. If he knows you.”

Franks makes for the door with no further comment. Karen calls after him. He stops with his hand already on the doorknob.

“This doesn’t change anything,” she warns him, “we’re done. I appreciate this, but it’s still over, with us.”

“With us. You ever wonder what you mean by that?” he growls, and leaves before she can answer.

**

When he returns, it’s near dawn. Karen is curled up on the cot, breathing in the residual smells of shampoo and gun oil and Frank enmeshed in the fabric. It’s comforting, in a strange sort of way. She sits bolt upright as he walks in.

“It’s just me,” he says gently, “you can lay back down. You might be here a while yet—we’ve got a problem.”

“What kind of problem?”

“Your devil friend got himself all torn up,” he throws up his hands as if to defend himself from the urgency of her response, the way she scrambled out of bed, “he’ll be fine. Has some nurse friend that patches him up, but he’s not talking to the cops any time soon.”

“Wonderful,” Karen says, falling back onto the cot. “I’m guessing it isn’t safe for me to go back home yet? Or work?”

“Not unless you wanna be used as target practice. You need anything from your apartment?”

“Some fresh clothes would be nice,” she says, and that’s how—as the sun peeks over the distant city skyline—she finds herself mapping out the location of her underwear drawer to the Punisher, along with the contents of her closet, a stash of cash she keeps under the mattress, and the exact location of her toothbrush.

He returns with all of the above packed into the same pack in which he’s toting a massive sniper rifle, plus a bottle of vodka she’d left on the counter.

“Thought you might be needing this right about now,” he says as he passes it to her, and she almost laughs.

“Good guess,” she replies. “Want some?”

“I think I’ll stick to coffee. But you knock yourself out.”

“Don’t mind if I do,” she retorts, and he actually laughs.

**

She’s several drinks in when it happens.

“What do you think I mean by _us?_ ” she says. Frank sets down the gun he’s cleaning.

“Not sure,” he says. “I won’t say I don’t feel it. I actually like you. Actually give a shit. That’s rare these days. And I think the feeling is mutual.”

“Is it?” she presses, “after what you did?”

“I did exactly what you knew I was gonna do. If that makes me dead to you, that’s your problem.”

She shakes her head and the room spins, so she sprawls out along the cot. The Frank-scented cot that smells so oddly like home.

“You’re not dead to me,” she whispers. “You should be, but you’re not. You’re not dead to anyone. You’re alive, whether you like it or not.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

She shrugs, the gesture happening in slow motion, the vodka-lag in her brain turning her every move into a slow dance through quicksand.

“You told me ‘I’m already’ dead, like you were trying to say it doesn’t matter what you do, if it makes you a monster. But it does matter. I remember, in court … that boy. You felt _remorse,_ Frank. For killing his father. You don’t want to be a monster.”

“What I want and what I get aren’t usually the same thing,” he growls.

“Doesn’t matter,” she says, slurring just a little. “You’re still not dead. You still get a choice.”

“Like you’re ever gonna be happy with my choices.”

“Maybe I don’t have to be happy,” she whispers.

Frank stands, crosses the room. He bends down beside her, close enough for a kiss, and for a drunken moment Karen hopes that’s exactly what she’s going to get. But all he does it pick up the vodka bottle, and walk away with it.

“You deserve to be,” he mutters, and sets the bottle down. “Now get some sleep, will you?”

**

Karen lives with Frank for three days. In that time, he insists on sleeping on the floor. “Too small,” he’d said, when she’d offered to share the cot, and he wouldn’t hear of trading her. He also insists on talking as little as possible, until the last night. He asks her questions. Question after question, her life’s story unfolding before him, pouring out of her as if she were helpless to stop it. Like a flood. And it occurs to her that she trusts him too much. Far, far too much.

And she knows him.

When he tells her that it’s safe to go home, no police necessary, she doesn’t need to ask what he’s done. She doesn’t need to critique it.

“Thank you,” she says. And he smiles a little.

“Don’t mention it.”

It’s the only exchange they share for the duration of their journey back into city. To her pristine apartment, undisturbed by his search for her things. He leaves her at the doorway. Just turns away without a word. She calls after him, softly. Loud enough that she knows he hears her, quiet enough that the neighbors have no reason to be curious.

She doesn’t know what she wants to say, just that she wants to say it, and she falters. He turns to face her, looking her over.

“I know,” he says after a moment, inferring the words she can’t say, and he disappears down the hall.

 


	2. Why

 

Karen doesn’t often respond to knocks at her door without a gun in her hand anymore. She inches her way toward the peep hole in response to two decided thumps, and one sloppy, muffled one like someone falling against her door—or halfheartedly trying to break it down. She pauses for a moment, waiting for another sound, or gunshots. None come. So she looks.

A head of dark hair is all she can see. Her visitor is, indeed, slumped against the door itself. But she knows that haircut, and she sets the gun aside, and scrambles for the lock.

“Frank?!” she exclaims as she opens the door, and he all but falls into her arms. “What the hell?”

“Need your bathtub,” he grunts.

“What? Why?”

“Better n’ bleeding on the carpet.”

It occurs to Karen all at once that the arm he hasn’t allowed to fall around her shoulders is wrapped around his body  … and bleeding profusely through his coat.

“Shit,” she says, and drags him into the apartment. Frank kicks the door shut behind him, and limps alongside her to her bathroom. She doesn’t get him as far as the tub: he collapses against the outside of it, head falling back against the edge.

“Fuck me,” he groans, grimacing.

“No thanks,” she retorts. It makes him laugh. Which makes him cough. Which makes him double over, clutching his right side with his bloody hands.

“What the hell happened?”

“Busted a rib or four.”

“And an arm. And your face.”

“Arm’s the worst of it.”

Karen sighs.

“Then let’s take a look.”

When his jacket is off, she wishes she hadn’t. Frank’s bicep is cut down to the broken bone, its jagged, pale edge peeking out at her from a window of gore that makes bile rush up her throat along with a small scream. She muffles both with her hand.

“That bad, huh?”

“Jesus, Frank …”

He glances over at the damage and grunts.

“Need a sewing kit. First aid. Duct tape if that’s all you got,” he says, as if her were ordering a pizza. “Maybe a ruler or something to stabilize it. Anything long, skinny, and hard.”

“You _need_ a hospital.”

“Not happening. You have a sewing kit or not?”

She does. She also has a first aid kit … and the duct tape. And an old paint stick. All he asks her to do is hand him various components of each, and thread the needle for him. His fingers are too bloody and shaking to hold it himself. But the worst isn’t the stitches, the pull of thread against flesh. The worst is the wound wash peroxide he dumps down into his arm, and the way it makes him arch against the tub, slamming his head back, gritting his teeth and breathing in so sharply it sounds like a scream in reverse. His hand closes on the bottle so that his knuckles go white, and Karen has to take it from him before he spills what’s left of it. He sits for a long moment after that, perfectly still, just breathing and bleeding and sucking air between his teeth with his eyes clenched shut. Karen can’t stand to look directly at him until he moves again, though she has to look away again a second later, as he yanks his own bones back into alignment. But by the end of all this, he has an arm that’s whole, and which has stopped bleeding on her bathroom tile.

“Shit,” he mutters.

Karen shakes her head, watching as he lets his head fall back—again—and he closes his eyes.

“Stay with me, Frank,” she says, placing a hand on his shoulder. “You lost I don’t know how much blood. You should eat something … or … drink something, or—”

Frank chuckles, and chokes on it.

“You some kind of medic now?” he coughs. “I’m fine. I’ll sleep it off.”

“On my bathroom floor? I don’t think so. Come on—I’m setting you up on the couch.”

“I’m not bleeding on your fucking couch,” he says. “Here is fine.”

“Bullshit,” she says. “Get in the shower, rinse off, and meet me in the living room.”

“Or what?”

“Or I’ll shove you into that tub, broken bones and all, and spray you down myself.”

Frank snorts.

“Yes ma’am,” he says, and reaches to pull his shirt over his head.

**

Frank reemerges from her bathroom looking a little pale, with damp hair, and wearing nothing but unzipped jeans, the underwear beneath them, and his tags. They hang low from his neck, drawing Karen’s eyes—for a moment—directly to the contours of his broad chest.

“How are you feeling?” she asks him.

“Like hell,” he says, “but I’ve been worse. You got any more bandage material? Or saran wrap?”

He jerks his head toward his side, where he’s pressing a hand against the offending ribs from earlier.

“I have saran wrap,” she replies, “ … why?”

It’s the question that leads to Karen walking wrapping the Punisher in plastic. Snakiing her arms around his waist, she passes the whole roll over him a few times at his instruction to stabilize the broken ribs. She can see at least one of the bones he’s cracked from the outside: there’s a frighteningly deep bruise over it already. She mentions this to Frank, and he cranes his head to investigate.

“It’ll either kill me or it won’t,” he says, shrugging.

“Damn it, Frank” she mutters.

He shrugs again.

“I think I’ll take that couch, now,” he says.

He eases himself down onto the furniture. He’s either in more pain than he’s admitting, or he’s just too tired to care if she knows how hurt he really is: even in the hospital, she’d never seen him this careful with himself. His every movement is incremental. But he won’t accept help. He lets her cram a couple of pillows behind him while he fights to hold himself up, and he agrees to drink some water and eat a granola bar that she digs out of her mostly-empty pantry, but that’s all.

Karen sits down right on the coffee table, leaning over to prop her crossed arms across her knees and better stare him down. He’s fading fast, bleary-eyed and exhausted. Bruises are rising under his eyes and across his cheeks. He glances at her sideways.

“Thanks,” he says, for the first time since stumbling in.

“For what, exactly? Why are you _here_ , Frank?”

He closes his eyes and releases a long, rattling breath.

“Needed to disappear long enough to stitch up that arm. Your place was a block away. You know how far mine is.”

“And what if I hadn’t been here? Or hadn’t let you in?”

“You think you’d have done that?” He asks, eyes opening again. He looks almost impressed, somewhere underneath the bruising.

“I’d be tempted to think about it. I know I owe you one, after what you did for me with Fisk’s people …”

“ _But?_ Yeah, ok. I get it—you’re still mad at me for icing that scumb–”

“No.” Her cutting him off doesn’t faze him. His mouth just snaps shut, his jaw working a little so that his temple pops. “Not mad, exactly. But there’s you at your best and then you as … whatever this is. Whoever it is you become to do this thing that you do.”

“This _is_ me. You oughtta know that.”

Karen shakes her head.

“Not through and through. How much of your humanity do you have to force yourself to let go of to pull that trigger, Frank?”

“None,” he growls, half-lidded dark eyes suddenly steely. “I remind myself every time I shoot what I’m fighting for. Why the broken system needs what I do. And what I do— that shit keeps me together. Without it … You were telling me I’m alive, or some shit … you ever considered that what I do is why?”

Karen opens her mouth, closes it again. Franks looks away, staring with impenetrable eyes at some point in the thousand yard distance only he can see.

“I don’t have anything but this,” he says.

“And what if it gets you killed? What will you have then?”

He snorts.

“Strong words for the devil,” he growls, “for putting all this scum on Earth in the first place. If I do suffocate on this couch, do me a favor and make them to bury me with the biggest gun you can find: I’m gonna take it with me straight to hell.”

Karen snorts, and leans away again.

“I don’t think you’re going to hell,” she says, and he laughs so hard that he buckles, grimacing, clutching at his bruised and broken side. Karen places her hand on his shoulder to push him gently away from the edge of the couch.

“What the _fuck_ makes you say that?” he coughs.

“You couldn’t possibly deserve it, on top of everything” she says. “Besides, you look like you’ve been through it already.”

He laughs again, weakly, choosing to ignore the first half of her comment. Or avoid it.

“I suppose I do,” he says. “Like I said–kinda feel like it, too.”

Karen nods.

“Get some rest, Frank,” she tells him, and she stands to turn off the light.

**

She’d left him a note telling him to leave the key under the mat when he left, so Karen’s first instinct, when she gets off of work and finds it’s not there is to panic. To start running through the list of people she keeps in her head that might want her dead or worse, and what she’s supposed to do about it with her gun and everything else she owns on the other side of a locked door. Unless it’s not a locked door, which would make it a trap.

But she doesn’t _feel_ trapped. And if it were a trap, wouldn’t they have left the key so that she’d walk into it unsuspecting? Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe Frank just pocketed her key, in which case she has a long drive out to his little safe house and a lot of shouting at him to do, but that’s nothing she can’t handle. She might even be able to get some gas money out of him for the trouble.

There is one other possibility, too. The most outlandish of the three: Karen takes hold of the doorknob, and turns.

The door swings open without even a squeak of protest and there, on the other side, limping around her kitchen, is Frank Castle. Frank Castle looking—between bruises and bumps and lurching movements—almost worse than he had when she’d left this morning; when he’d been wheezing on her couch and sleeping like the dead.

Karen slips through the doorway and slams it shut behind her. And locks it. Frank Castle, in broad daylight. The Punisher. In broad daylight. In her apartment. It’s 6:00 in the evening and the sun is slanting through her blinds, painting him in bright horizontal lines of yellow light. She switches on the overhead as she walks into the kitchen.

“What are you still doing here?” she demands. He looks up from the pan he’s just set down to simmer with a disparaging look in his soft eyes. The bruises beneath them are darker today.

“You wanted me to leave your key under the mat. In New York city? Are you out of your mind?”

“It would have been fine,” she mutters. “Are you … raiding my kitchen?”

“Didn’t know making you spaghetti counted as ‘raiding.’”

“You’re making me my own spaghetti.”

“Is that a problem? I’m hoping the answer is no, seeing as I’m about to chew this useless arm off.”

He’s still not wearing a shirt, and the bandage on his arm stands out like a billboard. She can see the shadow of blood beneath the outermost layer.

“I guess not,” she replies. “Need any help?”

“Only if you got a secret stash of real sauce somewhere. You eat this store-bought crap on purpose?”

“Oh, so now you’re the spaghetti expert and a vigilante? There’s nothing wrong with my sauce.”

Frank shakes his head, something almost like a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

“I’ll tell you what,” he says. “Write this down: the best damn spaghetti sauce you will ever have is a place called Marcello’s in Little Italy. It’s a ways down Mulberry, almost out of the neighborhood. Shadiest customers you’ll see anywhere outside of Hell’s Kitchen, ‘cause the owner doesn’t give a shit who walks through the door.”

“Including you?”

“Including me. Proof there’s a god.”

Karen has to smile a little at that. Just a little. She leans against the fridge. Frank busies himself dumping noodles into the pan.

“Are you recommending this place, or warning me away from it?”

“A little of both. Don’t go alone—take your devil with you, maybe.”

“No thank you.”

Frank glances up from his spaghetti, a salt shaker still in hand.

“You’re really just gonna walk away from him. From that.”

“I don’t think _that_ is what you think it is. He doesn’t hurt people the way you talked about, in the diner … he uses them. He expects the rest of us to cushion his fall, even though he tells everyone including himself that he doesn’t. He puts the people around him in danger.”

“So do I,” Frank mutters. His finger twitches at his side. He turns the salt shaker over in his hand.

“Not like Matt does. He’s a lightning rod, and it doesn’t matter how I feel about him if all I am to him is a way to discharge.”

“That’s a lotta anger for someone who doesn’t want to care.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t care. But it’s complicated. Let’s say you were right, that I do love him: whatever kind of love it is, it’s not enough to make me want to get involved with him again. At least, involved like that.”

Frank looks her in the eye for a moment too long, far longer than he usually does. He has the softest eyes. They don’t make sense in his angular, banged up face.

“Fair enough,” he says. “ … You still gotta try that spaghetti.”

“Ok,” Karen declares, straightening up and coming to stand beside him, watching the noodles boil over his shoulder, “sure. Are you offering to escort me?”

Frank almost drops the spoon he’s stirring with.

“You’re kidding, right? You’re seen with me, that makes you … what is it, accessory?”

“I’m already an accessory. You were on my couch all night and I never called the police.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I don’t know.” Karen stares down into the noodles, watching them soften and snake around each other as the water churns. “I don’t like what you do. But I’m not … certain that there isn’t a place for it. Besides, all jail is going to do is get you roughed up or killed, and I won’t be party to that.”

She glances up and finds him looking at her, eyes locked on her face, searching. He looks at her like that, half amazed, half wary, long enough that the noodles threaten to boil over. She’s wondering if she should say something when he shrugs.

“I go over there every Sunday, an hour before close. If you show up, whatever happens afterward is your problem. But I’ll get you in and out without anyone fucking with you.”

“Sunday it is, then.”

**

He shakes his head over every bite of the spaghetti he makes for the two of them, and leaves not long after dinner. He insists on doing the dishes. For the rest of the week, Karen watches the news, and thinks she can guess where he’s been. But she doesn’t see him.


	3. Spaghetti

Marcello’s is almost a 20 minute walk from where Karen parks her car. When Frank had said it was far down the street, he’d meant it.  Karen nearly walks past it when she finally arrives: it has old, foggy windows curtained in cheap synthetic lace and a little string of Italian flags. Its green sign is grimy, its illuminated cursive faint on the dark street, almost lost to the yellow light around her. It winks at her from a puddle she’s trying to step over, alerting her to its presence, and drawing her to the nearly-missed doorway.

Along one wall is a galley kitchen where a single teenage employee spins a pizza crust in plain view, the kitchen separated from the room by a low partition. Like many of Little Italy’s employees, his appearance suggests that his commute to work is no more than a ten minute walk from neighboring Chinatown. The older man leaning over the partition to talk to him is, in fact, the only recognizably Italian person in the florescent-lit room. He turns around as she walks in, squinting at her for a moment before his face splits into a broad smile. He greets her in Italian, with a New York accent so thick Karen could have cut it with a butter knife.

“Let me get you a table,” he says. Frank’s voice, all gravel, cuts in from the back.

“She’s got one,” he says. The older man—probably the restaurant owner—drops the Italian farce.

“No kiddin?” He says, glancing first at Frank, and then to Karen, “You gotta date with this psycho?”

Karen’s laughter bubbles out of her, all frantic and flabbergasted, before she can stop it.

“Cut that shit out, Deano,” Frank growls.

“It’s not a date,” Karen chokes.

“Deano” throws his hands in the air.

“Take it easy, I’m just fuckin with you. Pull up a chair. You need a menu?”

“No thanks,” Karen replies, glancing at Frank, “I’m told I’ve got to try the spaghetti.”

**

It takes twenty minutes for the food to appear. In that time, it finally occurs to Karen that she’ll be staring down the Punisher over dinner. That she’s sharing a table with a man who has a massive duffel bag behind his chair no doubt full of weapons she can’t even conceive of and the rattle of ammunition. That he has a way of sitting that lets him constantly eye the door without looking like he’s watching for anything at all. That he is an expert at what he does, and what he does is war. She’s written enough stories on it to know that by now.

She is about to eat dinner across from, not a murderer, but an assassin, and his warzone could spill through the door at any moment.

She asks him how he discovered the restaurant.

The food arrives.

He watches her with something _almost_ like a smirk hidden behind a raised hand and a cup of coffee as she spins her fork into her spaghetti. The first bite does something to her expression that makes him smile so broadly she can see it over his coffee and little crinkles appear in the corners of his eyes.

“Holy shit,” she says when she’s done chewing, covering her mouth as she sputters and swallows all at once, “this is amazing.”

“I told you,” he said, “better than that store-bought shit you eat.”

“Hey,” she says, pointing her fork at him, “leave my cheap sauce alone. If I had an endless supply of cash, I’d make sauce like this every week.”

“No kidding?” He says, brows rising, dark eyes bright. “Prove it.”

He reaches into his pocket and withdraws a wad of bills. He peels 20, 40, 60, 80, 100 dollars out of it and tosses them across the table.

Karen snaps her hanging jaw shut.

“What? Frank, no, I can’t take this—”

“Sure you can. Journalism pays you shit, judging by your pantry. So take it and put it where your mouth is.”

“Oh, come on … Where did you even get … ? Actually, on second thought, I don’t want to know.”

“No, you don’t. Just make your sauce. Get some fresh food, while you’re at it. Knock yourself out.”

“I mean …” she stares down at the bills on the table, and glances up at Frank. He’s smiling, again, as self-satisfied as a cat over spilled cream. “You know what? Sure. Come by next Wednesday. I’ll show you sauce.”

Frank laughs a little, throws his hands up.

“There anything you don’t go balls out about?” he says.

“Apparently not,” she says, shrugging, grinning, twirling her fork.

“Shit,” he says. “Look at you. Ready to take the ‘Punisher’ over fucking spaghetti .”

“Yeah, well, the Punisher never scared me, once I met him. Rumor has it he’s a decent guy.”

Frank snorts, glances sideways, eyes searching the horizon for something she can’t see.

“This is what gets you into trouble,” he says. “Nothing scares you.”

“No,” she replies, staring down into her spaghetti, “that’s not true. Most of what I’ve gotten involved in the last couple of years has scared the shit out of me.”

“But you keep fighting. Keep to your guns.”

“I just don’t know how to take no for an answer,” she says, shrugging. A glance at Frank finds him searching her face with the steadiest gaze he’s capable of.

“Yeah,” he says. “I think I figured that out already.”

**

Karen laughs so hard she hurts herself. Frank just keeps going, his head down, gaze a little askance.

“It’s my job. My city. I need to protect everyone and everything … fucking alter boy, I’ve got this. Catholic guilt and all,” is what he says, which is funny in and of itself, but it’s _how_ he says it that breaks her. It’s Matt Murdock to a T. Frank glances at her, and raises two fingers, placing his hands at his temples to form little horns, and Karen nearly falls out of her chair.

“Oh my _god,_ ” she sputters, still doubled over, “it’s perfect. Can you do lawyer Matt?”

Frank snorts.

“It’s the same thing, with a different stick up his ass. Less preachy horseshit. More pretentious.”

“So is that what he does when he runs into you? Lectures you?”

“Every goddamn time,” he says. Glancing at the door. It’s the fourth time since he’s scarfed down his spaghetti.

“You need to go?” she asks. He glances at her, at the door.

“Yeah. Got some business in Brooklyn.”

“Then I’ll get a box,” she says.

He shakes his head. “Take your time. Deano doesn’t give a shit how long you’re here.”

“If I remember right, you said you’d see me to my car. If you need to go, I need to go.”

He looks at her again, searching, as she calls to Deano for a box.

“Since when do you just go along with this?” he asks. “You know what kind of business I mean.”

“You’re going out there regardless of what I say,” she says, looking everywhere but his eyes, “so I’m just not going to ask.”

Frank snorts.

“All you do is ask,” he says.

She looks him dead in the eye.

“Only when I think you’re going to answer. Are you going to walk me to my car or not?”


	4. Digging

Karen spends the next week scouring every market, every bodega, and every spice rack in New York. She buys enough spaghetti for an army. Some spare, cheap cookware. And she experiments. She tries the basics. She tries meats. She tries spices. She tries stranger flavors—orange peel. Olive. Pot after pot of increasingly creative and unusual combinations of tomato and flavoring, all of which she freezes, and samples again, just to be sure how they’ll keep. She eats spaghetti for so many nights in a row that she has to invite Foggy over to sample the rest of it. When he asks her what the arsenal of sauce is all about, anyway, she shrugs and tells him “work.” “Pot luck.” That she’s trying to show up a coworker.

Foggy thinks a hundred-plus dollars’ worth of spaghetti and sauce combinations seems excessive. Recommends she take a few days off before she becomes a crazy sauce lady—something like a crazy cat lady, only sadder. And Karen laughs and they go for a drink, and then she comes home, a little drunk, and discovers the single most disgusting abuse of marinara ever created by mankind: Vodka marinara. She pours a little in as she continues to drink it, and when she samples in the next day, she has to spit it out before she vomits.

But, by the end of the week, she has something. A couple days of digging through quaint used cookbooks and recipes surfaced in secondhand stores the way she usually chases after a headline, and she finds it: some old family recipe that puts Marcello’s to shame.

When Frank Castle slinks his way down from the roof at nine at night and knocks on her door, she’s ready for him. The pasta is fresh and hot and all spread out across her sad little kitchen table with cheap wine beside it.

“It smells amazing in here,” Frank says. “I might have to give you some credit.”

“You’ll have to give me more than that. I’d say we should bet on it, but I think I’ve spent enough of your money already.”

Frank shrugs.

“No problem: Fifty bucks says nothing beats Marcello’s.”

“I was kidding. I’m not _really_ going to bet on your subjective spaghetti preferences, Frank.”

“Ah, come on. Fifty bucks to you if it’s better, I get to take the leftovers if it’s not.”

“Why would you want sub-par leftovers?”

“Spaghetti is spaghetti,” he says. “And I don’t cook much.”

Karen squints at him, crossing her arms as she looks him up and down.

“Ok,” she says, “you’ve got a deal. 50 bucks versus all the leftovers you can carry.”

“Done,” he says, and extends a hand. It occurs to her as she takes it that, as many times as they’ve touched—between her saran wrapping him and bandaging him and him saving her more than once—something this plain, this direct, is unusual. She’s never felt his hand before, not with her own fingertips. It’s warm, and dry, and rough. He has a bandage around his palm.

She releases his hand and he helps himself to a chair and a heaping serving of spaghetti. He waits for her to sit before putting any in his mouth.

“Well,” she says, “go on. 50 bucks, right?”

“Right,” looking everywhere but her, and he digs his fork in.

One bite in, and she knows she’s won. His brows shoot up and his eyes go wide and then fall shut, and he groans _,_ just a little _._ He’s going for another bite even as he speaks, shoveling it towards his mouth.

“What’d you put in this?”

“Spices, tomato …”

“No, your secret ingredient: What is it? How’d you know?”

“Know?”

“This is exactly like what my grandmother used to make. Old, real Italian countryside shit.”

It’s Karen’s turn to be surprised, though she’s not sure why.

“You’re Italian?”

“Grandparents were,” he says past a mouthful. “Castiglione.”

“I didn’t know that,” she says, seating herself and picking up a fork of her own.

“You surprised or something?”

“No, it’s just … Sometimes I suppose I forget that people like you, like Matt, didn’t just spontaneously spring up from the city one day. You actually come from somewhere.”

Frank shakes his head, stares off into the empty space to his right for a second before looking at her. It’s a tick he has that she can’t quite read yet.

“You’re not wrong. One thing the devil ever got right when he was talking to me, what’d he say … this city, you grow up in it, and it ‘becomes a part of you.’ Some nights I feel like I did just crawl out of the concrete, gun in hand.”

“New York made you,” you she replies softly, “as much as anything.”

He shrugs a little, finger twitching on his fork.

“The city, the war. I won’t pretend it doesn’t add up. I had something to pull me away from all that, and I lost it, so what the rest of it made me is what’s left over. It’s like a body still twitching. But fuck, listen to me.”

“I am,” she says. “Listening.”

“Don’t,” he says, something like a warning in his voice. “Just enjoy your perfect spaghetti, and the fact that I owe you fifty bucks.”

**

That Frank doesn’t help himself to thirds as well as seconds is legitimately surprising, considering the way he shovels it down. He throws his money down on the table when he’s done.

“I gotta say I’m impressed,” he adds, watching her take the bills. He’s already out of his chair, and she expects him to leave any moment. Karen allows herself a smirk.

“Good,” she said, “you’d better be, for the work I put into that sauce.”

She answers his next query by opening her freezer full of sauces, and Frank looks at her and snorts.

“Balls out,” he says, shaking his head.

“Every time,” she replies.

**

Watching Frank Castle scrubbing at her dishes is surreal. He stays to help clean up, but he all but fills her tiny kitchen. She left as an observer, leaning against the counter as he scours bowls and sauce pans. The sound is rhythmic, scratchy but soft. Scrub scrub scrub. It makes for a nice bassline to the bubbling song of the coffee maker on the counter beside her. She’d put the pot on for herself, though she catches him eyeballing it from time to time.

“You want some?” she asks.

“I’d take the whole pot if you’d let me.”

“Keep dreaming,” she says, “I have my own work to do tonight. I’m going to need this.”

“Good story?” he asks.

“Not a pretty one, but yes. I have a pile of crime scene photos to work through still. I know there’s more to see, I just need to figure out where to look.”

“You’ll find it,” he says. “Anyone can, it’s you. What’s the crime?”

“It started as threatening vandalism and now it’s escalated to robbery and murder. It looks like some kind of turf war.”

“In the Kitchen?”

“Yeah … why, do you know something?”

He shrugs, scrubbing a little harder at the pan he’s working on.

“I might. I could tell you who it’s not.”

Karen scoots closer to him along the counter, leaning down and over so she’s looking up at him from right under his nose, her hair on the verge of falling into the soap suds in the sink below.

“If you can, then you will,” she says.

Frank shakes his head, looks skyward.

“Balls out,” he mutters again. And then “go get your notebook or whatever … how are you going to list me as a source?”

“I’m not. I can do my own digging, Frank. I just need a direction to look.”

**

That conversation is what starts it. Every so often she opens her mailbox, and finds a news tip written all in quick, capital letters. It’s never anything big, never anything too dangerous, and half the time her articles end up serving as backstory for another instance of vigilante justice. He’s always a little faster than her. He has a tendency to kill his leads, though what rails he follows and what leads she chases don’t often overlap. She speaks to victims. He murders perpetrators. Some stories she chases find her standing at his crime scenes, and when she goes home to write it all down, find her throwing up.

She holds her hair away from her face and vomits repeatedly, Frank’s massacres swimming before her eyes, and wonders what she’s done by letting him near her. If she’s complicit in the atrocities he commits, or if it means something to give context to what he does. If it matters to tell the stories that get him started in the first place.

She tries to ignore his next tip, and finds that she can’t stand it.

And the tip he gives her after that one, as if he knows,  is all corporate crime, and no one dies, and _that_ she finds she doesn’t mind.

She also doesn’t mind when he comes to follow up on it when she finds him with an unlit cigarette between his teeth on the street outside her apartment.

“You know that only fools anyone it it’s lit,” she says.

“That’s not happening.” He spits the cigarette into his hand. “You got a trash can in that apartment?”

“What do you think?”

He smiles a little.

“Come on up,” she concedes, and he follows her inside.


	5. Deal

Once before, in the diner, she's seen him suddenly remember himself as he does now. His other self. "Stay away” muttered at her while  the bodies leaked crimson across the grimy tile at her feet and Frank’s breathing bubbled loud around her, drowning out her own half-choked pathetic, empathetic little sob. It was after that he’d tried his metaphorical suicide: “I’m already dead.”

They’ve since established that’s not wholly true, but his smile fades as he throws away his unused cigarette and Karen realizes with sinking certainty that she will not be having another pleasant conversation with Frank, over spaghetti or otherwise, as a result of this latest visit. Rather, she will be conversing with Frank’s empty corpse: the broken part of him that doesn’t want to be a monster with a fallout radius, clinging to his need to protect and to care—to _actually give a shit—_ even as he barrels toward something big and ugly. And she wonders, for a moment, where he’s going after this. What it is that has him at once so lively and so cold, close and then so far, and if it has something to do with the truth he’d denied once before: Kandahar.

She isn’t mad anymore, that he’d taken his peace where he could get it in the woods that night, before finding _purpose_ in his war. In fact she was never _mad_. She was horrified. And she half-hopes that what he’s hurtling toward tonight that has him so on edge is the truth, if he's finally chasing what he'd shot the colonel to keep from hearing. Though if that is what's happening, he doesn't say as much.

 “I’m going to stop leaving you tips," he grunts. "Going forward, what you do and what I do aren’t the same thing. Anything I could give you now wouldn’t help you.”

“What is it that you’re doing?”

“That’s not important.”

“Yes, it is.” Silence. He swallows. “Frank. Just talk to me.”

“There’s nothing to talk about.”

“Bullshit.”

His head snaps up.

“None of it involves you.”

“Don’t tell me this about my safety—”

“No,” he says, cold, rough, hard and ragged, “what you dig up on your own is your problem.Though I recommend you just stop.”

Karen crosses her arms.

“Why?”

Frank shakes his head, it’s almost a twitch.

“Because if you can’t take it, you shouldn’t get near it.”

“Excuse me!?”

Frank paces across her kitchen.

“You said there’s a place of what I do, but you don’t like it,” he says. It is an exact quote. She remembers telling him that, over dinner. “Well, that’s all well and good if that’s your compromise, but you’re letting it get under your skin.”

Karen bristles. Sweeps her hair out of her face and then crosses her arms again, tightly, as if to hold back the sinking dismay that’s leaking in her chest.

“And how would you know that?”

He shrugs. The gesture is casual but his posture is anxious: his trigger finger twitches against his thigh.

“I can see the difference. I read your articles. There’s what I handed you three weeks ago, about the kids, and there was how you handled that white collar crime shit.”

Karen allows a single guffaw, a burst of laughter that comes out.

“You gave me a lead on _child pornography_. Of course it ate at me.”

“So did me rounding up 14 middle aged men, shooting their knees out, beating information out of them, and putting a couple .45 slugs in their heads. I could see you getting sick just reading what you said about it.”

“Maybe it makes me sick that all that was what you had to do to stop it.”

“Or because you’re too good to be a part of the kind of stories I leave behind. Am going to be leaving behind. Stick to your mysteries and exposes. Don’t mess yourself up reporting on what I do anymore.”

“I will report on what needs reporting . . . Are you telling me this because you’re actually worried, or because you don’t want me to see what you do next?”

Franks looks left, right, and then stills, stares her dead in the eye. There’s a frantic desperation in his dark irises that reminds her, for the first time in a while, that he’s certifiably, diagnostically unhinged. She can see the anxious fire in his eyes, none of it meant to touch her.

“Did you like that white collar story or not?” he spits.

“Yes.”

“Then that’s the kind of shit I’ll leave you. Just . . . don’t chase me anymore. Stay away from this. Don’t expect anything of me . . . deal?”

Karen thinks about protesting. She thinks about the woods and how she’d pleaded and she’d threatened and then watch him shut her out, and himself off from any proper semblance of justice, and hopes again that finally chasing the colonel’s taunting, final monologues is what he’s doing. If it is, then why he wants her so far away from it is something she can dig up later only if she _doesn’t_ push him now.

Karen sighs.

“ . . . Deal.”

Frank nods. Some of the tension goes out of his shoulders, though she can still see it his fingers. Tap tap, tap tap. As he nods again, again. He seems to move without stepping, mobile though he stays in place. He swallows and she can see it move in his throat. He clenches and un-clenches his jaw and she can see it in his popping temples.

“Good,” he finally says.

For a long moment there is silence.

“So,” she ventures, just to fill it. Frank is no longer looking at her. “You read the embezzlement article.”

“Yeah. Did you get both guys? I only saw the one in the article, there was this other—”

“James Finn. Yeah, I’m working on him.”

Frank nods.

“Good,” he says again. He’s staring through the wall.

“Is that all you came to check on?”

He manages to look at he again.

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s it.”

“Oh.”

Frank shakes his head, vigorously now, opens his mouth and then closes it.

“I gotto go,” he says after a while longer.

She calls out to him as he turns for the door. He glances at her over his shoulder.

“You never answered my question:  is this about protecting me, or hiding from me?”

“Both,” he concedes. “There I some things you don’t want to see.”

**

When next she sees him, she asks if whatever he’d been working out had panned out. His answer is cold.

“No.”

It’s the last time she hears from him for a long while.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so the un-fluff reveals itself. 
> 
> On a related note, I'm experimenting stylistically with the fic and trying to play around with some different concepts, so comments from here on out are PARTICULARLY appreciated!!!! Thanks!


	6. Shot

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had this idea in my head that chapters would get shorter in this fic instead of longer . . . woops. Failed step one.

Karen doesn’t need Frank for a good story. She proves that to herself over and over again. She also doesn’t need someone to protect her, or so she tells herself as prepares to do exactly what she was told never to do. It takes her a few deep breathes to leave her car, to switch on the tape recorder. It’s old school, she knows, but she trusts it more than she does her phone to keep on recording no matter how much it moves around in the pocket of the heavy hoodie she’s wearing. Between it and the hat, she doesn’t look out of place out here by the docks. She doesn’t even look like a woman. She just looks like every other bum and worker and dealer that wanders these parts of the city and if she sidles into a warehouse a few blocks down, no one is going to notice, including the people meeting in the next building over; the one she knows has a hole in its corrugated tin garage door just big enough for her to slip through.

The meeting starts at midnight. She slips in at 12:15, long after their initial patrol of the space is over. She stuffs herself between stacks of storage crates along the far wall, just below the windows, and listens.

Her boss would kill her for doing this. But the things these men talk about . . . it’s such an ugly part of a bigger picture that she’s been chasing now for weeks: the reemerging face of La Cosa Nostra in Hell’s Kitchen. They’re under new leadership, unafraid of what it does to their reputation to let go of some of the pomp and circumstance and strict adherence to their unspoken rules. This is not the mafia of _The Godfather:_ this is the kind of brazen criminal that takes over a city swept almost, almost clean by violence. These are the enemies Frank has made for himself. And while this is exactly the kind of thing that he—like every other sensible person she knows—would tell her to stay away from, it hits too close to her own neighborhood for her to say no to the tip she’d gotten. Her chance to crack this wide open.

Of course, that tip had come with a caveat: the nervous witness she’d chased down had told her repeatedly, to look, really, she doesn’t want to be in that building. He had it on good authority (that he wouldn’t share) that she should stay far, far away from this building. But here she is, and so far, so good.

That’s what she’s thinking when the first man drops. It happens all at once: the crash of the window above, and a heavy thump as a man goes limp and heavy as a sack of wet cement and hits the ground. Then begins the shouting: swearing and scrambling, Karen hears them coming in her direction, the hammers pulled back on their weapons, and more of the glass comes down. Crash crash crash, thump, thump, thump. Karen throws herself off her storage crates and to the ground. There is gunfire coming from the other side of the crates.

“Shit,” she whispers to herself. She can’t stay here. She’s directly below the windows, outside of the trajectory of the shots, but it can’t be long before the mobsters realize the same thing that she has about where they ought to take cover. So she has to stand up. She stays hunched over as best she can, and runs for it. But she’s seen.

“Hey!”

The shout reaches her first, and the rest happens in slow motion. She scrambles to duck a little further, turning around another set of crates, and feels a heavy blow against her arm and then bright, searing pain. The sound of the shot hits her much later. The force of it knocks her sideways, and she trips her way behind the crates.

“Shit, shit, shit . . .”

The man who shot her is coming after her. She can hear his footsteps beyond the dwindling gunfire. He’s shouting. “There’s someone over there! There’s another one!” He’s pounding across the floor. She’s dead. She’s dead unless she can hide, or move faster, which she’s not sure she can. She’ll have to wait until he’s right on top of her and then bolt, try and make for the door and disappear down the alleyway—

Bang, thump. The footsteps fall silent. Someone is yelling after the dead man: “Vinny, you dumb fuck! Stay covered!” But it’s too late.

There is a long, tense moment in which no more shots arrive. She hears voices, wondering what Vinny was after. Telling each other to go over there. And then the door bursts open behind the men’s cover, and a burst of gunfire so repetitive, so fast, and so heavy that it sounds like terrible thunder rips through the room. Followed by heavy footsteps, and a man’s groan. And a low voice that it chills her to realize she knows.

**

When Frank is done interrogating the one living man, when the final shot rings out, Karen gasps. She covers her mouth. She’s just heard death. Not for the first time, but it hits her all at once: she’s heard the whole thing. His last moment, the sound of him crying out as Frank’s boot beats against his ribcage, his pitiful monologue of information, and the shot to his head once he was done—she’s just heard it all, and done nothing. She’s just let the Punisher work. And work he has. She could turn off the tape recorder, now: she’s heard more in the last few minutes than she ever dreamed of, the whole story laid out on a platter.

She’d fought with Matt once, about Frank, and told him that he shouldn’t deny that what Frank does works. She can argue with herself over that point now less than ever.

Frank must hear her her reaction, deep, shuddering breaths, because his footsteps stalk toward her stack of crates.

“Get out where I can see you,” he orders, and Karen steps out as slowly as she can manage, pulling her hood and hat off as she does.

Frank sees her, and looks ready to drop his gun, some rapid-firing assault rifle. Maybe an AK.

“Oh, Jesus fucking Christ.”

He’s on her in an instant, sweeping across the floor. He does indeed set the gun down, tossing it onto a crate beside her before grabbing her arms, hard. His enormous hands fold over her biceps, and she cries out.

“Fuck!” he says, yanking his hand off of her injured arm, staring down into the blood on his fingers. “You got shot?”

“One of the mobsters,” she says, the words half lost as Frank physically sits her down on the crates and brings his fingers up under the hem of her hoodie, and right there, in a warehouse, his gun sitting beside her, starts pulling her clothes off. Karen uses her unhurt left hand to hold down the shirt beneath her hoodie as he pulls it off, easing it gently over her arm.

“I can’t fucking believe this,” he says.

“Is it bad?”

“It’s a bullet wound, what the fuck do you think?”

“Well is it going to kill me?”

He stops his frantic inspection of her arm, and looks up into her eyes. She can see him computing his own reaction, the way his voice sounds: like gravel. Like danger. Like he’s about to lose his mind.

“No,” he says, a little more calmly, a little less guttural, correcting himself, “it’s a nine mil and it grazed you. Bit a pretty good chunk out, but it’ll close with enough stitches. Where the fuck is your car?”

“Two blocks away.”

He shakes his head, and brings her discarded hoodie up to her arm. He wraps the sleeve around it, tightly enough that Karen’s eyes water. It’s occurring to her now how much it _hurts,_ and Frank’s merciless bedside manner is only making it worse.

“Hold that on there,” he says. “Come on, we’re driving you to a hospital.”

“No!” Frank is halfway to standing already, and he freezes when she shouts.

“No?”

“No, if I go to a hospital I’ll have to tell them it’s a gunshot wound. I can’t afford to explain that at work. If anyone finds out I took it this far they’ll shut down the whole story and everything like it I ever want to work on. I can’t let that happen.”

“Bullshit you can’t. That’d be the best thing to ever happen to you—do you know how stupid this was?” He kneels in front of her again, his hands hovering in front of him. She half expects him to grab her, maybe put his bloody hands to her cheeks and hold her face there so she has to listen while looking straight into his eyes. They’re alight in a way she’s never seen before, alive with fear and something else, something that has nothing to do with her. It’s like the glint of the AK has somehow snuck into his irises.

 _“What If this is just me now?”_ he’d asked her once. She’d thought he meant the panic, the sympathetic nervous system that keeps him miserable. But maybe he’d also meant something else. And Karen, maybe because of the pain, maybe because of surprise, blurts that right out.

 “You love this,” she says.

“Fuck,” he looks away from her, at her, away, and then leans in, inches from her face. “Now is not the time for your goddamn psych evals. Did you hear me? Do you know how dangerous this shit is? Do you know what they’d have done if they found you? If you’d been standing at the wrong end of the room when I opened up on them?”

“One shot, one kill, I thought.”

“Not when I’m on full automatic!” he shouts, picking up the gun from behind her and holding it up as if she should somehow know by looking at it whether he’d been taking precision shots when he walked in.

“I didn’t know you’d be here.”

“That’s even worse. These people don’t fuck around. Shit . . . this is . . . since when do you have a death wish, huh? I thought you were a smart girl-- but this, this is the stupidest fucking thing anyone has ever done. Do you get that?”

Karen almost says she’s sorry, but bites it back. She hopes her eyes look steely, because steeling herself is exactly what she does.

“No,” she says, “letting these people get away with what they were talking about doing before you showed up is stupid. Doing nothing is stupid.”

Frank shakes his head.

“Mother _fucker_ ,” he says, gaze falling sideways and down. “I can’t believe you did this.”

“It wasn’t supposed to turn into a shootout, Frank. That only happened because you showed up.”

“Exactly,” he says, head jerking up. The fire in his eyes is subsiding, replaced by something else. Something sad and sharp that cuts right into Karen’s heart. “I could have shot you.”

“Frank—”

But he’s the unsteady one, now. He wavers a little in his posture, and his voice cracks when he talks.

“Fuck, Karen. I could’ve killed you.” It’s the first time he has ever called her by her name. _Karen._ He almost grunts it, his voice rough against the K and hard on the N, all gravel and that low, seething quality he has mixed up with desperation that lightens his tone and suggest that, if she ever heard him happy, really happy, his voice might even be light. Not a tenor, probably, but at least a baritone. As he says it, something in his eyes turns from bright to broken.

 _That’s_ when she feels guilty.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I didn’t mean to mix you up in this.  You aren’t supposed to feel responsible for me.”

“Responsible,” he scoffs, “you think that’s what this is? All that moral bullshit like your devil talks about? I’m not in charge of you. It’s like I said. I give a shit about you, I—”

“It’s this thing between us, I know.” She hasn’t put it to him that way since that night in his safe house, after that thing with Fisk, and it seems to take him a minute to remember it. Like he has to sort through some kind of mess, some rubble in his brain to get to it.

“I’m begging you,” he says, when it clicks. “Don’t ever do shit like this again. I didn’t tell you to stay away from this for my health. This is serious. This is the shit that will get you killed. Don’t make me do that. Don’t make me let that happen. Not again.”

 _Again._ That word hits her like a ten pound cement block, swung directly at her stomach. She swallows, hard. _Do not cry, Karen. Do not cry._ Her eyes are already stinging over the pain in her arm; letting them overflow would be far too easy, but she has no right to that, not now. She’s never seen him this upset about anything but the past, the ghosts that agonize his fractured mind every second he isn’t distracted, and her damnable empathy is stabbing at her tear ducts, but letting herself indulge it would be more selfish than anything. So somehow, she holds it back. She swallows again and makes her voice as hard as she can manage.

“I can’t just ignore what's happening,” she says, “I’m not like you, or like Matt. This is what I can do instead, and I will keep doing this as long as there’s a story that needs to be told . . . but,” he’s looking at her, so pleading and aching, such big, sad eyes, “I’ll try to be more careful.”

Frank shakes his head.

“That’s not enough,” he says, but if he means to lecture her, or try and talk her out of her job any further, he’s too distracted her arm to do it. She’s bleeding through the hoodie, now, if only a little.

“Come on. Someone has to stitch that up.”

**

She manages to talk him out of the hospital by pulling out the first aid kit she keeps in her car. After that night he’d come to her to fix up his arm, she’d added a few less conventional materials to it, including a needle and thread, and a couple shooters of whiskey, as well as hydrogen peroxide—the whiskey being for the moment when the peroxide comes into play.

Frank lays out her hoodie across the back seat between them before pouring the peroxide across the wound, muttering as he does about how she shouldn’t use this shit too much, how it slows healing down . . . Karen is too busy gagging on the whiskey to hear him. She chokes it down at the same moment that he pours, for all the good he does. She doesn’t mean to, but she shouts. If her eyes were watering before, they’re definitely overflowing now.

“Oh, fuck,” she says, “fuck, fuck, fuck—”

She claps her hand over her mouth.

Frank sets aside the bottle to give her shoulder a firm, distracting squeeze. He shushes her as he does, not condescendingly, not in a way that says he’s worried about her being overheard—not that he needs to be, a woman screaming in the back seat of a car isn’t going to raise much interest beyond  eyebrows, after all—but in a way that’s gentle. That’s meant to help. To tell her he’s sorry that it hurts.

“Easy,” he says, almost a whisper.

She swears into her hand, and it comes out all muffled and pathetic.

“I can still take you to a hospital.”

She shakes her head.

“No,” she says again, “no hospitals. Just do it. Just stitch it up.”

Frank shakes his head.

“Balls out,” he mutters. “You made of flesh and blood, or nails?”

“Hopefully nails,” she whimpers. “This is going to suck.”

“Yeah it is,” he says, “last chance for that hospital.”

Karen picks up the other shooter.

“Do it,” she says, and Frank threads the needle.

**

Karen hates herself for crying. She probably shouldn’t, it’s just a physical reaction she can’t control, and Frank had been muttering “tough as nails” with every other stitch as if genuinely impressed that she could grit her teeth through it as well as she had, but she still feels silly. And stupid. As stupid as Frank had told her she was being. It was a reckless move, she knows. That part she’d accepted from the start. But not expecting the firefight . . . not having even brought her own gun—maybe stupid _is_ the right word for that. And that’s part of why she can’t stop sniveling. She aggressively wipes her sleeve across her eyes. Frank, driving silently, glances over at her.

“How’d you even know about tonight?” he asks, maybe trying to distract her. When she tells him, he closes his eyes, and his knuckles go white on the steering wheel.

“What is it?”

“That’s my source,” he says. “I’m going to beat his fucking face in. _Idiot.”_

“He did try to warn me. He didn’t say that you would be there, but I think he was trying to tell me something other than the meeting might happen if I went.”

“That would be because I told him that I was never there if anyone asked.”

“Then all he did was what you told him.”

“Little shit shouldn’t have said word one to you either way.”

Karen shakes her head.

“Leave him be, Frank. I got myself into this, not you. If he hadn’t \told me he would have pointed me to someone else who could. One way or another, I’d have figured it out.”

“I still can’t believe you pulled this shit at all.”

Karen wipes her eyes again.

“You have what you do, I have what I do. There’s more to this than the usual mobster bullshit, I know there is. Someone has to find out what before someone innocent gets hurt.”

“Like you?”

Karen sighs.

“No, like a bystander. Someone who isn’t even involved.”

“You _shouldn’t_ be involved.”

Karen twists in her seat, trying not to bump her arm as she turns.

“Look,” she says, “maybe this wasn’t my best decision. But I got exactly what I needed from it, and now I can finally _do_ something with this story that will make a difference. You don’t get to tell me to stay away from something like that.”

“Like that, like me. . .”

“Being around you has yet to actually cause any problems for me . . . Blacksmith aside. Look, there was probably a smarter way to handle tonight, but you have to admit . . . it was working. You of all people should respect that.”

Frank sighs. His index finger taps the steering wheel in a rhythmic, anxious pattern. She’s surprised to see that of all ticks when he’s already killed at least twelve tonight. _It’s stress. It’s his response to stress._ It says a lot about him, says something dangerous that calls into question the escalation that she chooses to pursue next.

“Look, getting in your way is obviously a bad idea. So is trying to do things the way I did them tonight, but there was no way for me to know how high the risk was. If I can’t stop, maybe there’s a way to make sure I don’t walk into anything quite like that again.”

“Are you asking me for news tips again? I told you, I don’t want you following what I do.”

“Yeah—remind me, was that because you’re worried about me, or don’t want me to see how good you are at it? You like it, don’t you Frank?”

“It keeps me focused,” he says. “Don’t dig at it. What are you getting at?”

“What if there was a way for me to check in ahead of time and see if what I’m walking into is going to blow up? Or find out who could tell me what happened without me having to be there.”

“I am not going to be your informant.”

“I don’t want you to be. I was suggesting that we continue to share.”

“No,” he says.

“Frank, please, give me something here, I’m just trying to—”

“No.”

“Damn it, Frank, listen to me. I will find a way to do this on my own. You aren’t going to stop me. But what if there was a way to check ahead to see if who I’m going to talk to, or where I’m going to look around, is a bad idea? Since I came to this city I have been shot, I have been kidnapped, I have been threatened, I have _killed a man_ to save myself . . . I don’t do this for fun any more than you do.”

Frank glances at her sideways. Her stomach turns over once.

“Ok, I don’t do this for fun, period.”

“Of course you do,” he says. “You like getting into the shit no one wants you to touch.”

“Someone has to,” she says. Frank snorts.

“You’re about one good story from turning into Red,” he says.

“But not you.”

“Maybe me, too. I guess you’re not afraid to shoot. You shouldn’t be proud of that, by the way—being like me.”

“I’m not,” she says. “It scares the shit out of me.”

“Good.”

For a while after that the only sound is the windshield wipers squeaking away the rain, and the turn of the tires against the cracked old pavement of the city road. Karen clears her throat.

“Look,” she says, “all of that aside: I don’t _want_ to end up doing that again. Back there in the warehouse, I . . . it was bad, okay? You’re right about that. It was stupid. So why don’t you help me do it better next time?”

“How do you think I’m gonna do that, exactly?”

“Well, for one, you can tell me if you’ll be there . . . and if anyone else who’ll be there will be likely to start something. Or look around. Or if the sources I talk to can be trusted.”

“I am not helping you with this.”

“I’m not asking you to, just—give me a way to check in and plan ahead, that’s all I’m asking. I’m going to do what I need to do, just tell me when it’s going to mean walking into someone’s crosshairs. Especially yours.”

Frank looks at the road for a long moment before his eyes slide in her direction. It occurs to her that he should be bothered by the fact that he isn’t even pretending to look at the road, though a little voice in the back of her head wonders if he even needs to look at something directly to be aware of it.

“All you’re asking me for is a heads up?” he finally asks. Karen nods, trying not to look too eager.

“That’s it. And it won’t be often, I don’t plan on making a habit of this, but if we keep ending up on the same case . . .”

Frank sighs again, and stares out into the rain and the glare of city lights it paints across the roads. His trigger finger is twitching again, and she wonders where he’ll go after this. And she wonders if she even wants to know, trying her best not to think of the sounds of combat boots driving into ribs that will be intermixed with the rest of what she recorded—the way Frank’s voice sounded, dangerous and potent, as he tore answers out of the dying mobster. She’d told him once, that he wasn’t dead after all. She'd been right. Killing that man, slowly but efficiently, had left him very much alive.

“What did you have in mind?” he finally says.

Karen grins despite herself. “Just a way to get in touch.”

By the time Frank pulls her car down her street, she’s hammering away at her phone, punching in the Punisher’s number.


	7. Call

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shout out to Takiki16 and the anon on tumblr who gave me some prompts to play with in this chapter: Thank you so much!

Having Frank’s phone number isn’t as weird as she’d have thought it would be. She’d considered putting it under some coded name, “Joe” or “Francis” or something, but it seemed unnecessary somehow. Besides, she liked seeing his real name staring back at her from her contacts list, just there, just present, available if she wants it. Though why she’d want it, she doesn’t know. She won’t be sleuthing around chasing gangsters again any time soon (or so she hopes) and over the next several days, the more she thinks about what she’d seen in his eyes, and what she’d overheard, the more she wonders if she’s finally lost her mind, and why she’d want to keep talking to someone so brutal at all.

She has to stop the recording from the night of the warehouse shooting four times to get through it. The gunfire is more frightening to listen to than it was to sit through, with nothing else on her mind to distract her from it, and the way the man Frank had interrogated _sounds—_ all broken and bubbling and groaning and sobbing . . . it’s nauseating. Almost as much as Frank’s voice, growling. Eager. Hungry. Merciless. So cool, so calm, so . . . _practiced._ So perfectly at ease. She can’t shake the observation he’d ignored: his fight does more than keep him focused. It’s gratifying, somehow.

_Jesus, Frank . . ._

She tells herself that it’s like an addiction more than something he enjoys, really. _Like,_ she assures herself, is the wrong word. And even if it isn’t, it has to be more complicated than that. _You’re not a monster,_ she thinks, staring at his name in her phone, one hand still poised over the tape recorder. How long she does that before it occurs to her that she’s thinking far too hard about Frank Castle, caring too much—again, as if the woods had never happened, though they most certainly _did_ happen—and she locks her phone and tosses it aside. Which is probably how it happens that the next afternoon, sitting at her desk, spinning the phone around in her hand while she stares into a blank word document, she manages to press something she shouldn’t.

The worst part is that she doesn’t realize it for a good 45 seconds. It’s not until he escalates to shouting that she notices, her stomach dropping right out of her body and the blood rushing into her head.

Karen claps the phone to her ear.

“Oh my god,” she says, the words like a runaway train, coming too fast and wholly without dignity, “I am so sorry. I didn’t mean to do that, I was just—”

“ _What?”_ he says. He sounds groggy and angry.

“I am so sorry.”

“This is . . . you pocket dialed me?”

“I am so, so sorry,” she’s curled over the phone, pressing it so hard against her face it’s almost uncomfortable, as if he could somehow hear her instance better that way. Maybe it at least helps with the fact that she’s practically whispering, lest someone in the office overhear and ask who’s calling. She’d rather not have to lie.

“What am I, on speed dial?”

“Of course not. I have no idea why—”

He swears, and she hears a muffled, heavy sound. Like he’s falling . . .

“ . . . Did I just wake you up?” she asks.

“Yes,” he grunts.

“Oh my god, I am _so sorry­—”_

“I heard you the first time,” he sighs. “Don’t worry about it. Dream sucked anyway.”

“Oh . . . I feel like such an asshole.”

“For waking me up, or scaring the shit out of me?”

“Scaring you?”

Frank “hmms” an affirmation, low and rough in his throat.

“You called me—no reason you should do that unless something’s up—and then didn’t answer. I thought you’d gotten yourself in trouble.”

 _“_ Oh, God, I am a jerk. I’m so sorry. It won’t happen again.”

 _“_ Better hope not,” he says. Karen sits up in her chair.

“Is that a threat?”

“Sure,” he says. “Don’t make me come over and delete this number.”

“I’ll be sure to write it down just in case, then.”

Frank grunts.

“You do that,” he says, “I’m going back to bed.”

**

Karen almost jumps out of her skin. Someone is knocking. It’s 3:00 am. She moves for the gun before instinct gets the better of her. She sneaks up to the peep-hole.

It’s Frank, looking off to the side, looking strung out and tired and a little nervous. She opens the door slowly.

“Frank? What the fuck?”

“I need your couch,” he says.

“What the hell for?”

“You owe me an hour of sleep.”

“You did _not_ come to my apartment at 3:00 am to get revenge for a phone call.”

He shrugs. He’s still not looking right at her.

“Maybe I did.”

Karen sighs, or begins to, and then stops herself. He looks grimy somehow, and has a hood on that he’s pulled far over his head so that his eyes are all in shadow. But they look wild.

“You need help,” she concludes.

“Yeah,” he says. “I fucked up.”

Karen sighs.

“Come on in.”

It occurs to her as she does that she shouldn’t, that she should stop letting him in, period, after what she’d overheard in that warehouse. She needs to draw the line somewhere.  After all, Frank is, for all his merits, insane. He’s addicted to combat and using it to cope—he’s like an alcoholic, only he murders people. And beats them up first.

Which she’d just stood by and allowed.

Just like she’s allowing this.

She tries to ask herself when it’s going to stop, but she’s too busy asking _him_ what’s going on.

“I got sloppy,” he says, “and there’s a whole crew of shiitbag gangsters watching my place. I’d go in and just hit them, but a couple have shacked up with the neighbors. I don’t know what they’ll do to them.”

“Oh God, what are you going to do?”

“Draw them out,” he says.

“Please tell me that happens _after_ you leave here.”

“Of course it does,” he growls. He isn’t angry, she can tell. She imagines he’s frightening when he’s angry, and he isn’t now. “I just need _somewhere_ to crash they aren’t watching, I . . . shit, I haven’t slept in two days. Since you called me.”

“Jesus. Don’t you have other safe houses?”

“Couple,” he says, “but it took me an hour to lose my last tail. This is where I ended up, and your light was on . . .”

“Lucky for you,” she says. “Come on. Couch is yours.”

**

Karen had been working at the coffee table before, so she pulls up a chair and continues where she was as Frank sleeps beside her. He barely hits the pillow—face first—before he’s out. She’s never seen him so tired.

 _There’s a lot of him you’ve never seen,_ she reminds herself. She’s still working on the story from the warehouse, and she can still hear his voice. “What do you know?” all cold and hard but electric. Right before the first kick hit.

She blinks the memory away, staring into her notebook. She has all the information she needs for the article, now—it’s compiling it into something coherent that’s proving a pain.

She’s just on the verge of a breakthrough, playing with the idea of long-form journalism and wondering if anyone at the Bulletin would work with that, when Frank scares her halfway out of her chair. He lurches upright with a kind of stifled shout and lunges at nothing, an arm swinging outward that Karen has to shrink away from, barely avoiding a hit to her still-healing arm. Franks eyes are open, but blank and groggy—though she’s never witnessed anything like this before and shouldn’t know any better, something tells her he’s not actually awake . . .Which is why he’s very much in danger of rolling off the couch and crashing into the coffee table. She doubts she’ll be able to catch him if he does.

Afraid to touch him and set him off, Karen says his name. And then shouts it. What the neighbors will think she doesn’t care to know—and she dreads for a moment that one of them will come over and hammer on her door, telling her to shut up, demanding to be let in so that they can yell at her in person, and that she’ll have to find a way to get Frank up off the couch and out of the way. Her apartment, lit by the one lamp she leaves on for these late nights, isn’t the best environment for making a criminal ID, but Frank’s face has been on the news enough that she wouldn’t dare chance it. It’s a relief when the third shout wakes him.

He blinks rapidly, bleary eyed, and takes in his half-on, half-off the couch positioning, Karen perched on the arm of her chair with her knees pulled up, and he blanches.

“Did I hit you?” he breathes. There is no energy behind the words, only something exhausted and stricken.

“What? No. You just  . . .”

“Thank God.” He collapses back into the couch, arms tucked under him, face in his hands, sandwiched between him and the pillow.

Karen swallows.

“Does that . . . happen a lot?”

Frank lifts his head, rolls over, halfway onto his back.

“Used to. I clocked Maria, once, after my first tour. Hadn’t adjusted to it all yet. Thought the guilt would end me.”

“But it only happened once.”

“Once was too much.”

Karen resettles herself in her chair and clears her throat.

“Did it get better, or . . .?”

“Slept on the couch for two weeks before she made me come back. Left four my second tour a month later. Somewhere in the middle of that, I got over it. Like I said, flashbacks, PTSD, I never had that. Just the sleepwalking shit that first time.”

“What about the second tour changed?”

Frank shrugs.

“Got used to it,” he says. “Got good at it.”

Frank puts his hand over his eyes, digging into his temples with his fingertips for a moment before dragging it down his face.

"How much sleep did I get?" he asks. She allows the change of topic.

"Maybe an hour."

"Shit," he says. "No wonder I feel dead."

Karen shakes her head, and stands up. There's an awkward moment before she decides whether or not to touch him--eventually concluding that she shouldn't, that the little nudge of his shoulder she'd been tempted to offer is too much--in which she just stands over him, nervously pushing her hair behind her ear, aware of his eyes on her, searching. She clears her throat.

"Get some sleep, Frank," she says. He sort of grunts, nods, eyes half closed already.

 

**

The next morning she drives into Queens, Frank lying low in the back seat, out of sight. She drops him a few blocks from an old warehouse that she suspects contains his arsenal. Before he closes the car door she leans after him and says:

“Good luck,” wondering again, not for the first time in the days since the warehouse shooting, what it is she thinks she’s doing, what it says about her, and if she’s completely losing her mind.

 _That’s the_ Punisher _walking away from you,_ she thinks, watching his silhouette receding down the street in front of her. _And you barely even care._ He makes her sick, sometimes. Even scares her. And every new things he learns about him just paints a more complicated picture, even messier and gray than before. Murderer. Soldier. Vigilante. Protector. Grieving. Thriving. _What is wrong with you, Karen?_

_Why do you always want to know more?_

Part of it, she concludes, is her nature. The rest, she has to confess, is Frank.


	8. Bravery

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to you, tumblr Anon, whoever you are, for the gift prompt!

The funny thing about Frank is that she only sees him every few weeks, or even months, but her reaction never changes. There’s a little rush, her blood moving faster than it should, a racing, airless sensation, and a bit of relief that he’s still in one piece _to_ see, and, though she sometimes desires it and sometimes resents it, there is always that little steel something that settles in her stomach. It feels like the words _be brave_ sound, which is odd, because she’s not afraid. It usually goes away as soon as she’s talking to him, replaced either by contentedness or irritation or worry, depending on the day and his attitude and how much he’s limping. For someone who leaves so much destruction in his wake, he takes quite a bit of damage himself.

Which, when he’s in the Kitchen, means using her apartment as an emergency safe house.

“Why don’t you just buy a place in Hell’s Kitchen?” she asks him one night, watching him jam a dislocated shoulder back into place. It makes a sickening sort of crack-pop sound.

“Don’t need to,” he says.

“You say that like there will never come a day when I’m not home, or when I have company, or when I’d rather be sleeping.”

He shrugs.

“I’ll take my chances.”

“You _never_ take chances,” she says. “You improvise sometimes, but you don’t gamble.”

Frank laughs a little, almost to himself.

“Maybe the truth is I don’t like your neighbors. And they don’t like me.”

“My neighbors . . . you mean Matt, don’t you?”

Frank shrugs the newly reinstalled shoulder, his lip twitching as he does. It’s the only indication that he’s uncomfortable.

“Devil doesn’t like me on his turf,” he says. “Doesn’t want people ‘dying on his watch,’ or some shit.”

“His _turf?_ Oh for the love . . . _Matt . . ._ wait, does he not know how often you come here?”

“Only knows if you told him.”

Karen laughs, the too-loud kind of laugh reserved for the truly absurd.

“No, definitely not. I don’t think I need to hear that lecture,” she says.

Frank snorts.

“Me neither. Truth is, he hits faster that I do. That’d be a hell of a lecture.”

“Sometimes I honestly still can’t get over the fact that he hits at all . . . you know, I spent _so much time_ accommodating him, trying to be helpful, guiding him around, piling boxes all around _my_ desk so he wouldn’t have to worry about feeling around for them—maybe it’s stupid, or selfish, but when he told me the truth I didn’t feel like he was making anything up to me, any of the little lies. All I could see was one _big_ lie instead . . . it made me realize that I made myself look like an _idiot_ for him.”

“You weren’t the idiot.”

“Maybe not, but I felt like one. I just can’t believe . . . how much ego do you have to have to enjoy someone giving you help you don’t need? Why didn’t he let me ease off even a little? When he told me the truth, it just made me feel like he’d . . . I don’t know.”

Frank nods, inclining his head a little to watch her intently. He as a very even, easy stare, warm and cool at once. His scrutiny, when not depreciative, isn’t uncomfortable.

“He took advantage.”

“ _Exactly,”_ Karen breathes.

“Is that why you didn’t hold on? That how he hurt you?”

“Not the only way, but it certainly was a deal-breaker . . . is that blood on your shirt?”

Frank glances down and presses his fingers against a dark, wet spot just below his collarbone, and frowns.

“Didn’t even feel that one,” he says, and moves to pull his shirt over his head. His shoulder cracks. He swears.

“Didn’t you just fix that?” Karen asks, watching him massage the offending joint.

“Not well enough,” he says.

Karen crosses her arms and raises her eyebrows.

“And to think you were just telling me ten minutes ago that ‘joints are easy.’ I’m pretty sure those were your exact words.”

“Yeah, well, they’re getting harder,” he grunts, jerking his arm around in its socket, “I’m not getting any younger.”

“Or doing yourself any favors,” she replies, sighing. “Here.”

Karen reaches out to him and takes his shirt by the hem. She has it halfway up his chest when she meets his eyes, and has to look away again. She can’t make sense of exactly how he’s watching her, if it’s wary or incredulous or baffled or something else.

He wriggles his good arm out of the shirt on his own, and lets her guide the fabric down over the other. She hands him the shirt when she’s done by shoving it into his chest, closing up the slow-bleeding wound there.

She stands for a moment after he takes the shirt back, unsure where to look. His chest. His face. The space in between. He has a broad, prominent collar bone she’s a little surprised she never noticed before: it brings out the contour of his shoulder and his neck, both of which she has noticed before, though she hadn’t given much thought to it at the time. She’s not necessarily giving it any thought now: mostly it’s a lack of thinking, some instinctual response to peeling a man’s shirt off momentarily taking over her brain. She shakes it away.

“I’ll go get the bandages,” she says.

When she comes back she finds she’s able to look at him again, still shirtless and rinsing out the wound, all without batting an eye over any of it except, perhaps, to wonder who had gotten close enough to him to cut him across the chest, and if he’d taken care of them.

**

It was the “not getting any younger” comment that started it.

_< Can you come over tonight?>_

_< Why?>_

_< I have something for you.>_

_< Like what?>_

_< Just come find out. Can you come over or not?>_

The next message comes nearly an hour later. Such is texting with Frank.

_< I have something at 9. Can come by after.>_

Smiles to herself, triumphant. She looks at the cardboard box on her table.

“We are going to make his night,” she says to the box, “whether he likes it or not.”

**

“What is this?” he asks, staring down at the box.

“Open it and find out.”

“I feel like I should check our history first. Kind of feels like a set up. Did I bleed on your couch, or something?”

“As a matter of fact you did,” she says, crossing her arms, “but that’s not what this is about. Fortunately, I happen to know how to get blood out of fabric.”

“Elbow grease and cold water,” he replies.  “Nothing to it. so what’s the box about?”

“I told you, open it and find out!”

Frank sighs, shakes his head.

“I don’t know what you’re doing with this,” he says, plying open the box. He opens it panel by panel, one handed, standing a little back from it as if he actually expects to find a box of grenades. Something similar to which—perhaps a really nice gun—she’d actually considered for one very brief moment, before it occurred to her that he would _use_ them, and that’s he didn’t want to be complicit in that any more than she already is. So she’d settled with something non-lethal.

Frank leans over the open box, and his brows furrow. He withdraws one of the mason jars she’s stacked two-high inside it, and holds it up the light.

“This is sixteen jars of your spaghetti sauce.”

“Eight,” she corrects. “There are also some homemade noodles toward the back.”

“Shit,” he says, smiling, a cockeyed, sideways grin. “I’m going to have to hit the gym. I’m going to be eating pasta every night for the next month.”

“I’ll take that kind of commitment to eating it to mean that you like it.”

“Sure, I love it,” he says, still smiling a little, though also staring at her intently. “But that doesn’t tell me why you did it.”

That’s the first time it occurs to her that he really, truly, doesn’t get it. She can feel her own brows furrowing, and sympathetic, obvious gesture she’s not sure she likes though it escapes her anyway.

“Frank,” she says, “isn’t today your birthday?”

He blinks at her once. Twice. And then says the date.

“That would be today, yes,” she says. Frank looks down at the sauce. He makes a low sound in his throat, not quite a “huh.”

“I stopped keeping track of dates,” he says to the spaghetti before looking up at her. “How did you know?”

“I was on your defense team, Frank, I read every file I could ever find on you. Knowing your birthday is not that surprising.”

“No,” he says, now almost laughing a little, “I suppose it isn’t . . . Thank you.”

Karen waves away the thanks.

“Happy birthday, Frank.”

Looking back at the spaghetti, he nods.

**

It occurs to her only as he’s leaving that there might be a line she’s crossed. Everything about Frank is somehow deeply personal, or completely alien, but this act, a gift, a gesture just for fun, is somewhere in the middle. And she doesn’t know what to do with middle. Especially since, on the surface, nothing has changed at all, with one exception: The next time she sees him, the _be brave_ feeling is gone.


	9. Reminder

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Takiki16 for this chapter's prompt!

_< Are you ok?>_

Of course she’s not. She’s just killed twelve people . . . Who could have killed more.

 _< I’m safe.>_ she finally answers. _< Not sure that’s the same thing>_

She drops her phone back in her pocket as they start wheeling the bodies out.

As Karen stares at the gurneys parading one by one from the building, her hands pressed over her mouth, her eyes watering so that the blood on the sheets covering the bodies blurs and smears, she feels cut-off from herself. All she can think is _you did this,_ but the words don’t sting enough. _Every time you’ve helped him has added up to this._ That, and every story she’s written. After all, the reason these twelve people are dead is that they shot first, raining down bullets in the largest press conference in New York, making good on threats that the Bulletin—and others—have been receiving for months. That’s why these twelve people were here. These twelve dead people, covered in sheets, being carried out to ambulances that have already turned their lights off, wanted to kill her any everyone like her. And so someone had killed them.

Frank had killed them.

Frank, who frequents her apartment. Who she’s given spaghetti. Who she’s fought with over stories, their paths weaving together as they chase the same blood trails through the city. Karen writes in crime, and corruption, and its victims. Frank makes victims of the perpetrators.

And the truly horrifying thing about that is that she’s still going to let him in. They’re at middle ground, now. No man’s land. She doesn’t know what they are but she never tells him no.

Her phone buzzes again in her pocket. Sniffling, she pulls it out to look.

_< It’s close enough.>_

“No,” she whispers down at the screen, “it’s not.”

**

He comes to check on her later.

“That upset you,” he says.

“Twelve people are dead, Frank. Of course it did.”

“Twelve people who wanted to kill you and everyone you’ve ever worked with.”

“I know,” she says, pacing the kitchen, “I know. I just can’t. . . . How do you do it, Frank? How do you make the decision of who dies to save whose life every night?”

He shrugs

“Easy,” he says. “I ask myself if they’re capable of doing to someone else what was done to my family. Directly, indirectly, doesn’t matter. I ask myself if I’d have been happy knowing my kids were growing up in a world with those people in it, if they’d had the chance. If the answer is no, I pull the trigger.”

“And anyone else who gets involved?”

“Getting involved is their choice.”

“So it’s a war where you give yourself the orders, and everyone else are just enemy combatants.”

“What do you think I am to them?”

Karen could almost laugh.

“A hunter.”

He seems to consider this for a moment, bowing his head by an inch and staring a million miles away in no particular direction.

“When I was in Recon, I figure everyone we were up against felt the same way. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t a war.”

“A war,” she repeats. “Right.” Frank’s war. That he likes, that he . . .

She usually tries not to think about that. She can still hear him interrogating that gangster with the toe of his boot. She can still picture his face afterward, all that light in his eyes. How he’d looked so incredibly alive.

**

After the press conference, Karen does a better job of reminding herself what Frank is. She makes a point of reading the articles that describe his hits, of turning up the TV when the Punisher’s name is mentioned. She absorbs his actions and tries not to vomit them back up, while also telling herself, over and over, that this is a warzone. She’d always known that, but she finds she needs reminding. Frank’s war that he loves. She’d let herself forget about it, for a while. She won’t do it again.

Not that reminding herself prevents her from letting him into her house, again, and again, and again. It just makes her think a little harder about him as she watches him limp around. The honest truth, she has to admit to herself, is that knowing what he is doesn’t change all that much, because she’s known _who_ he is from the start. So she watches, and she thinks, and she wonders about the layers still left of him to unravel as she listens to him talk, and keeps letting her make him smile.


	10. Caring

It was probably inevitable that this would happen. Despite all he is and all he does, with this thing between them, a usually unspoken idea of “us” and that here nor there middle ground way of being, it was bound to cross her mind eventually.

There is a line between sex and love, and it occurs to her, one night, when Frank is up and around—if only barely—shirtless and bandaged and coughing up blood into a tissue in her bathroom, that she could just . . . fuck him, plain and simple and meaningless. That there is a half-naked man in her house and that a man is a man and that there is something about Frank, his soldier’s posture, the movement of his muscles, the glint in his eyes even when he’s bleeding and his hands smell like gunmetal, that is potent and virile. _He_ could fuck _her._

He keeps her at arm’s length, so much of the time. Walks in and out of her life, never close enough to become a part of the fabric of it, that if she told him to take her to bed, she thinks he’d do it for her. And it would only mean a little, and he’d move on, back into what he tells himself is an endless mourning period though he feeds on every battle of his war. Sex is not love, and she could have sex with him any time she wanted to. The option is there. And a part of her is almost curious enough to take it.

So she wonders what keeps her from saying something. From going into that bathroom, wiping the blood off of his lip and then kissing him until he stops wondering what’s happening and lets his hands start wandering, until he pushes her up onto the counter and _nails_ her into the mirror. If _that’s_ how she wanted it, she imagines—in a split second of unbidden, perfect detail—then _that’s_ exactly how he’d give it. And given that it’s been awhile, that she likes his big, rough hands and dark, soft eyes, there really is no reason she _shouldn’t_ do exactly that.

But she doesn’t.

It occurs to her that she can, and she stands frozen by the thought, and nearly drops the glass of water she was going to bring him, and then she shakes it off, and walks into the bathroom . . . and does nothing. She sets the water on the counter, shakes his head at him, says “this is going to kill you, Frank,” and watches him laugh.

“Not before I get a few more hits in,” he replies. Karen presses her hands into her temples, massaging slowly, and walks out.

There is a line between sex and love, and it’s blurry. It’s mixed up with _caring_ , which is not quite love and is far, far from sex. So, yes. She could fuck him. She could do it right now. Maybe do it again, the next time he comes around. And it would just be sex. Nothing more, nothing less. But the problem with that, she realizes, as she moves to pour herself a drink of her own, is that she _cares._ Cares about him, as a human being.

Karen could fuck the Punisher.

She’d never dare fuck Frank.

 

But once she thinks it, she can’t un-think it. She blows it off, shrugs it off, flips it off, but the thought keeps popping up at random intervals as Frank eases himself onto her couch for what is probably not the last time this week. He’s in bad shape. All he’d asked her for was her car, but she’d ordered him into the apartment when he’d shown up two nights ago with blood on his teeth and a black eye already swollen shut and a gash in his head that screamed CONCUSSION to even her untrained eye.

“You gotta stop helping me,” he’d gagged past the blood in his throat.

“Shut the fuck up and get inside,” she’d half shouted, “don’t come here at all if you’re going to ask me to watch you die.”

“Jesus, Karen, I just need your car . . .”

“Get. Inside.”

He’d nearly passed out on the stairs.

And now he’s back on her couch, pretending he’s not half-dead. And she’s trying to think of something to say to him that isn’t berating him, that won’t dig too deep or get too close to what she most fears asking— and then, there it is: the simple fact.

She could fuck him.

And it’s the fact that she’s _desperate_ to chase the thought away again, and that she knows she _wouldn’t_ fuck him, that’s most concerning. It’s as if all these months of interacting are piling up on the highway of her mind, demanding she open up the road ahead in one direction or another, anything but this unspoken limbo of a relationship that they have.

So she beats that thought away, too, and dives right in to the conversation she didn’t want to have.

“Do you even care, Frank? Do you even care anymore if you live or die?”

“Sure I care. If I go out, who the hell is gonna take care of the filth in this city?” He scoffs, “Red?”

“That’s not a reason.”

“It’s reason enough for me.”

“When you say that this is all you have,” she ventures “you really mean it, then.”

“No orders. No family. No future,” he grunts, looking askance. “I’ll take purpose where I can get it.”

“And so you have your mission. You gave yourself an _endless_ war. Frank, how is that—”

“What?” he spits, “healthy? You forget all about that trial? According to the doc _you_ brought in, I’m out of my fucking head anyway.”

“According to that doctor, you’re _hurt,_ not crazy.”

“Damaged,” he snorts. “That’s the word you’re looking for. May as well come out and say it.”

“You know what? Fine. Damaged, Frank. You are damaged. That means you need to heal, not throw your life away.”

“You offering to fix me? You a shrink now?”

Karen stands up, looming over him as best she can, fists closed at her sides.

“No,” she hisses, “against my better judgement, I am your friend.”

And there it is—the real reason she can’t fuck him, stated outright for the first time. _I am your friend and I care. Probably too much._

Frank inclines his head on the pillow. Lifts his face as far as he can stand with what is probably a ruptured disk in his neck, and stares straight up at her. All his flippancy is gone. He looks at her with wide, deer-in-the-headlights warm eyes and a slightly open mouth that has nothing to do with the robust swelling in his lower lip. And then he collapses back into the slump that’s the only posture he can withstand, as hurt as he is.

“Shit,” he says.

“Yeah,” Karen replies. “Shit.”

**

She catches him trying to roll out from under the blanket she left him around 2:00 am, and she sweeps over to the couch, and leans over in front of it so that they’re eye to eye in the dark, and glares.

“Don’t you dare,” she says, “try and walk out of here in the shape you’re in just because I give a damn.”

“That’ll get you in trouble,” he says.

“Then that’s my problem, not yours. Sit back down and get over yourself, Frank. It’s not going to kill you to let one person to care.”

Frank sits up a little further, so suddenly he winces, and swears.

“Care about what?” he demands. “Huh? What’s it to you?”

“Your life matters to me, that’s what it is _._ You can keep telling me you’re dead to me, to you, to everyone. You can keep telling yourself there’s nothing left and maybe that’s true. Maybe there is no fixing you. Fine. But it _matters_ that you don’t die out there, alone, because you couldn’t admit you’re still human long enough to tolerate someone giving a shit.  Don’t do that to yourself and do not, do _not,_ make me complicit in it. Now sit down, and rest up. And don’t even _think_ of walking out on me. I don’t deserve it.”

Frank concedes, relaxing back into the couch.

Karen retreats to her bed.

“Karen,” he says, before she can climb back beneath the blankets, “what the hell do I do if letting you care kills you?”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“. . .  No,” he says, voice turning to gravel, “it’s not.”


	11. Business

The next time Karen sees him is nearly three months later--long enough for him to run out of her spaghetti--and it’s her idea. The first part isn’t unusual, though the second is.

She marches into Marcello’s at 8:00 on the dot, and there he is, at the back, with his duffle bag of probably-guns. He stands halfway out of his chair when she walks in.

“Sit,” she orders.

“Oh shit, you’re in trouble big guy,” Deano says from behind the partition. Karen glares at him and she sweeps over to Frank’s table, and takes the seat across from him.

“You shouldn’t—“

“Don’t you dare,” she hisses, “give me a lecture about my safety, when you are the one who _knew_  was worried about you, and just walked out. I have your back. I let your bleeding ass sleep on my couch, I pushed your ribs back into place, and I _told_ you not to make my decisions for me, and then you went right ahead, and pushed me out.”

“What the hell are you talking about? I didn’t push you out,” he says, “I’ve been busy. Had my ear to the ground for a month and a half. I didn’t need to crash on your couch for that.”

“Frank, you are such an asshole.”

“You come all the way out here just to insult me?”

“No. I came out here because I need a lead and you know the ugly underbelly of this city than anyone I know.”

He raises his eyebrows.

“Shoot,” he says.

Karen does.

**

“Is that everything, _everything_ you know?”

“If I knew more, the shitbags would be dead already. How’d you hear about this?”

“A social worker tipped us off. She’s been trying to take in trafficked girls off the street and can’t get any help from the authorities, so she came to us.”

“Piss off the public, put the pressure on the cops.”

Karen nods.

Frank looks at her for a long moment.

“If I tell you that you should stay away from this, are you gonna bite my head off?”

“I can’t just walk away from this. What happens to these girls . . .”

“I know. Which is why you shouldn’t be sniffing around alone. Tall, blonde, face like yours? You think they’d be nice enough to kill you if you got in their way?”

Karen wishes she could control every vein in her body, because she blanches despite herself.

“I’m not going after them myself. I just need to know who else I can hunt down for information. A proper interview.”

“There I can’t help you. Everyone who tipped me off is dead.”

“Oh, God, Frank.”

He shrugs a little, glances away from her.

“Had to get my ear to the ground somehow.”

Karen sighs, and puts her face in her hands.

“Fuck,” she says.

“Yeah,” he replies, “I know.”

**

“I want you to tell me when you get them,” she says into her half-finished spaghetti. “I don’t need to know what you’ll _do_ to them, but I want to know when they’re gone.”

“When this outfit is gone, or when everyone I can find in this cesspool of a city is?”

“Both.”

**

Frank comes to her to tell her when he’s done, not a thousand, but a hundred thousand yard stare keeping his eyes off her as he speaks.

“I did some shit,” he says. “To get to them.”

“I’m not here to judge you for it.”

“Maybe you should,” he says. “You’re the only one I’d wanna to hear it from.”

Karen shakes her head. A strand of her hair falls in her face. Frank focuses on that, and only that, boring holes through her follicles with his eyes.

“I can’t, she says, “and I won’t.”

Frank is still staring at her hair.

He nods.

There is a long moment of silence before Karen stands.

“Do you want something to eat?” she asks as she heads into the kitchen. Frank followers her like a man in a dream.

“I don’t know,” he says. Karen bends down into the fridge and withdraws some plain, buttered noodles. And then reaches for the alcohol cabinet.

“You sure?” she says, so wry and dry her words sound brittle as she holds out the pasta and the bottle, “It’s vodka penne.”

She passes him the bottle. He looks at it a long time before sighing.

“Fuck it,” he says. “Why not?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just for the record, the idea of having Frank go after human traffickers and do some shady shit in order to get to them is not my brainchild, but Garth Ennis'. The concept comes from a Punisher MAX arc called "Slavers" which I recommend as a piece of storytelling generally, and as a Frank story, with the caveat that it is NOT for the faint of heart and is incredibly violent and uncomfortable.


	12. Breaking

“I don’t do this very often,” Frank says, lowering a now-empty glass, reaching for the bottle to re-fill it.

“I can tell.”

“Hey, you’re one to talk.”

Karen laughs.

“Give me some credit,” she says, “I’m not drunk _yet_. You’ll know when that happens because I’ll probably say something stupid.”

“Looking forward to it.”

He says it with a smile, without looking at her, something sad in his eyes, and she wonders for the hundredth time since they say down on the couch together, the now empty pasta Tupperware between them, what it is that he’s done that’s gotten so far under his skin. Or if it’s the _what_ he’s done that’s really bothering him at all.

**

Karen tells herself that what she’s about to say is _not_ stupid, but insightful, and that she is not _drunk_ yet, not really. She’s just thinking too hard.

“Frank,” she says, interrupting a few minutes of slow-sipping silence, “do you think maybe you’re you upset about this because it isn’t like warfare? What you did to the slavers?”

He stares at her for a second, a little glassy eyed.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what you do, you talk about it like a battlefield, but whatever it was that you did that has you so upset, maybe it _wasn’t_ like a battlefield. Maybe it was something else, and that’s why it’s bothering you so much.”

“Huh,” he says. “Maybe.”

Silence reigns for a few more minutes. Karen watches the light playing off of what’s left in his glass, watches him raise it to his lips and empty it, watches the way he scrapes his teeth over his lower lip to wick away the moisture. He has a nice mouth, soft.

She blurts her next question, her swirling thoughts spilling over, without looking away from his mouth.

“If it wasn’t,” she wracks her brain for her limited understanding of military terminology, “standard operating procedure, then, why’d you do it?”

“Because I had to make it clear to them, to all of them, what happens to anyone I catch doing that in this city ever again. I had to get the job done.”

“And?” she presses, sipping her drink as insomuch as straight vodka can be “sipped.”

“And what?”

“Is that all?” she asks. Frank makes a low sound, a kind of gravel-sounding “hah.”

“Probably not,” he admits. “I also hated them.”

“And that’s not like war?”

He shakes his head.

“Different kind of hate.”

“Oh,” she says. “So that’s it.”

“Guess so.”

He doesn’t look like that’s it, like there’s no more mystery to it. His index finger runs back and forth across his glass, a rhythmic, cathartic rubbing. Karen watches it move, wondering. Musing over Frank’s war—the one she won’t let herself forget about it—and the way he’d looked when he came to her tonight. How distant. How lost. How calm, but unsettled. Not like the other times she’s seen him after a hit. Not _alive,_ not—

“ . . . Frank?”

He shifts his position on the couch and lifts his glass again, forgetting for a moment that he’s already downed the rest of his drink.

“Why do I get the feeling that you’re about to ask me a question neither one of us will like the answer to?”

“It’s what I’m best at,” she says. Frank shakes his head.

“Alright,” he says, “then you might as well ask it.”

“Ok,” she says, straightening up, clasping her glass in her lap, “I wonder if there isn’t still something more to it, so I’m thinking, about how you have this war. About what you do and all the times we’ve talked about it, and this thing you keep avoiding when you talk about it . . .”

“Karen.”

“Right, sorry. But do you remember how you said you liked it, what you did in the marines?”

“Some of it.”

“How much is _some_?”

“Enough. Why does that matter?”

“Because that’s the missing piece: I think that you didn’t just like it. You _loved_ it. You still do, and that’s the other reason why you’re so upset about what happened this time. There was no love in it for you.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about you, and combat. You love it. I’ve seen it,” she says, lurching forward across the couch, “in your eyes. I tried not to, I tried to ignore it, but I can’t just overlook it anymore, I can’t keep . . . caring this much and not know. And it would explain so much.”

“Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out.”

“Yes . . . but I want you to confirm it. I want you to say it: tell me you’re in love with combat.”

“You’re out of your mind.”

“No! No, I’m not. You _are_ , you are in love with it. With all that control and all that firepower. With having life and death in your hands.”

Frank snorts.

 “Let me tell you something about war. Little secret: _Everyone_ loves that part.”

Karen glances away from his eyes, and down into her glass. It’s empty again—she’s not sure when that happened. That might worry her if she weren’t lost in imagining rows of young soldiers firing from humvees, dirt on their faces, smeared across their cheeks beneath sunglasses, hands white-knuckles on six-barreled miniguns eating their way down rattling belts of ammo while a war their nation only half understands erupts in sandstone-colored city streets around them. She tries _not_ to imagine blood in the dust, whether American or Afghani or Iraqi, or to picture a world where someone could smile as they put it there.

But it’s easier to accept than she’d like: her own adrenaline spikes just remembering Wesley. The consecutive bang, bang, bang, bang, bang and the kick in her hand and the sudden high of knowing she was _safe._ That she’d _won._ Even if she’d panicked a second later, and had to drink her way from relief to guilt to remorse, just to say she felt anything about it other than confusion, at the time it had all been so . . . _simple._

And there was something else about it, too. An uglier emotion associated with her memory of Wesley.  Not a love of killing—something darker still. Less reactive.

In her head, something clicks into place.

When she looks up from her glass, Frank watching her.

“You know that’s not why I do it,” he says. “This thing I am—I do it for them, and because it keeps me sane. Fills a need. Maybe that’s a bad thing, but like I told Red: we don’t get to choose what fixes us.”

“But it doesn’t _just_ fix you, does it?” she blurts, drunk and fixated on Wesley, on the nasty, repulsive emotion she knows she’d felt just before pulling the trigger. “I think I’ve just figured you out, Frank: a part of you doesn’t just love this—and you do love it—but part of you . . . _wanted_ this, too, didn’t you? Not the tragedy, of course, but this. What you do now.”

“Excuse me?”

There’s a warning in his voice, but now she can’t stop. It’s all adding up too fast in her head: love and hate and wanting and the illusion of fate, Wesley and Schoonover and the warehouse and the park—

“I think you . . .” she says softly, “Oh my God, I think you _chose_ this. You had the opportunity to get your peace with Schoonover and you didn’t, you walked away, and you threw it all out, because you were afraid he’d take away your reason to fight if he told you what happened to your family was about anything other than a gang war, was about Kandahar, or wherever else you were. You could have known the truth but it would have stopped you from doing what you’d already decided to do. What you wanted to do, and that’s—”

“What I _needed_ to do,” he interrupts, before she can add _that’s why you did what you did in the woods._ She’d understood it only instinctually then, but it all makes sense to her, now. And her stomach turns over the truth.

“It has to be more than that, though,” she insists, trying to make him say it, trying to make it real, “with what you’ve committed to . . . you chose to fight _crime._ In New York City, which is a war you know you can’t win. It’s just going to keep coming and coming, there will always be someone else looking to step into the voids you leave. This is the kind of war you fight until you _die_ , only to win _nothing._ But you knew that. And you _chose_ that, Frank.”

“Bull fucking shit.”

“Yes, you did. Because you want justice for your family, yes, and because you need a purpose, yes, but because you liked it, too. . .” her own voice sounds astounded to her ears, “ Because it made you feel _good_ instead of like you were just hanging on, and you wanted to keep feeling that. Tell me I’m wrong.”

“You’re—”

She is decidedly drunk, now, and so doesn’t care that she cuts him off.

“No, Frank. I’m not wrong. I am not wrong about you: some part of you _chose_ this. And now, some part of you is addicted to it, as long as it isn’t something you hate, as long as it stays something you love. If there was a way to stop, and keep your sanity . . . I don’t think you’d take it.”

Franks expression goes as hard and cold as she’s ever seen it. Like a man in a trance, wide eyed but frozen and forgiving. Even his trigger finger stops twitching.

“You really believe that.”

“I—I think I do.”

He’s silent for a long time. She can see his jaw working, anger or something else. And then he straightens up, very suddenly, leaning toward her on the couch. Karen doesn’t jump. His posture is casual, though his eyes are wild.

“. . . Yeah. All right,” he says, all strained tones and gravel. “Let’s go with that . . . let’s . . . look, okay, I’ll give you this: at first it _was_ different. All business. Remind myself what they did to my family and shut it all down. That’s all it was. But maybe that changed. Maybe there is more to it, shit, I don’t know . . .  I remember, that doctor, talking about how it was that fucking gunshot, I was never gonna feel any better, and maybe I started asking myself how to really make it stop. If justice wasn’t going to cut it, what was I supposed to do when the Blacksmith was gone?

“And all right, maybe that’s around when it hit me, that I just wouldn’t have to stop. I could destroy the Blacksmith, and his whole outfit. I could ruin that fat fuck, Fisk, for having the nerve to try and use me for his dirty work. And maybe I thought, fuck, maybe I needed that. I remember I was getting ready to blow this guy’s brains out—wrong guy, didn’t’ pan out—and being terrified because I didn’t feel peaceful. And I was thinking, still trying to tell myself, once this bullet is in him, then it’ll be fine. Then it’ll be over. And knowing . . . knowing that was a lie. That all I was doing was setting up for his whole outfit to come after me, and _welcoming_ that, because when that one second of peace was gone . . . this mess would still be what I am. And shit, yes, now it’s _all_ that I am. I’m a killer. I know that. I’m at war and I’m a killer and I don’t want to stop, but I tell myself, at least it’s for a good cause. I’m doing the right thing, I know that. This city needs me to clean up its mess, and I do . . .

“But shit, it’s so easy. Some of the shit I’ve done . . . and it was all so easy. Skills they gave me in Recon I never thought I’d use, I did. Right here, in New York City, on American soil. But it was necessary, and I did it. And when it got to the end, that last shot lining up, the last man on the list to end that trafficking bulllshit, yeah,  I felt pretty fucking good about it. That part, taking the shot . . .  yeah. All right. I love it. I want it. And maybe it’s all I’ve got left I’m gonna feel that for, so I keep doing it.

“What sin do you suppose that is? Gluttony? Doesn’t matter. In any case, I’m damned. And I’m fine with that. Have been since my first tour.

There’s something so earnest in his eyes that it breaks her heart. And then his expression turns rueful, a scowl.

“ . . . Or maybe I’m not,” he snarls. “Because, maybe every fucking word of that was bullshit,” his tone turns frantic, now. _Anguished._ Rising in pitch and volume and cracking at the edges. “Maybe every time I load up a gun, every time I step out my door, all I’m still seeing their faces. What does that mean, huh? You wanna know if I do this for love. Sure I do. But tell me, which fucking kind?”

“Frank . . .”

“No,” his cracking voice shatters, his voice too broken to be a snarl, though it comes close, “tell me. What part of this am I in love with? Which part of this do I need, which part of this shitshow keeps me going, do I _want,_ did I _choose,_ because it keeps me waking up in the morning when every fucking time I close my eyes all I see is Lisa bleeding in my arms—my little boy’s brains splattered across the grass—you tell me, you tell me I don’t do this because I loved _them_.”

He’s inches from her face. His chest is heaving. He’s searching her eyes with unrelenting desperation, demanding that she have something to say for herself.

Karen is quiet for a moment, and when she speaks, she does so slowly, hoping she’s not slurring but wishing for another drink.

“Of course you do. It’s not just one thing, Frank:  It’s all of the above. You did _choose_ this. You _do_ love this. But I don’t think that you wanted to. You don’t want to like it, and that matters because it means you’d rather suffer. You have survivor’s guilt, Frank. In the worst way. And you can’t get away from it because of everything happening in your brain. So I think you hate how much you love it, and you pretend you didn’t want it, and when you wake up tomorrow, and you’re sober, you’re going to deny all of what I’m saying. You’re going to tell yourself it’s all for justice—and part of it _is_ , part of it always will be, because you do, you love them so much—but you’re also going to tell yourself that yes, you need it, but don’t enjoy it, you don’t _want_ it, that you didn’t _choose_ it, because you can’t stand to let yourself believe that.”

“You’re right. I can’t.”

He looks at her, and away. Stares holes into the ceiling. Karen stares down at her empty drink. After a moment, he fidgets, turns to look at her, glaring like an animal in a trap determined to bite the hand that releases it.

“. . . This is a whole steaming load of bullshit, Karen. You know that?”

“Frank—”

“I’m done.”

She doesn’t dare test the words. She’s saddened herself, somehow, breaking him open like this. Maybe it’s the vodka, but his resentment makes her heart hurt. The discomfort that underlies it turns her stomach. And worse than all of it is the truth. She _was_ right, though he denies it. About all of it. About choice and need and what he loves. What he will always love. And how much it could consume him. So she steps away. She stands up, and says simply:

“ . . . Ok.”

**

He’s gone when she wakes up. The glasses and Tupperware are in the sink. What’s left of the vodka is in the cabinet.

Karen slumps against the counter, staring at the dishes, and then sinks to the floor, a single thought running on a loop through her spinning head: _I’m never going to see him again._

Staring out across the linoleum, she wonders why she should even want to.


	13. Repair

“Frank!”

Karen pounds down the alleyway, away from the crime scene, chasing down low rooftops. Which one he’s on, she doesn’t know, but the shots came from this direction.

“Frank!”

She doesn’t know what she’s going to do if she doesn’t catch him. Texting him, she supposes, is the obvious thing, but it feels wrong somehow. It has since the night he left, when she’d woken up and sat down on the kitchen floor and stared at the cabinet for an hour not knowing what to say for herself, or why she should say anything. But then he’d shown up at the crime scene to clean up stragglers—not that there had been many—and she’d realized how _close_ he was, and she’d taken off. Karen Page, journalist, trying to catch the Punisher on the run all on her own. So far, none of the cops have followed her. They have no vested interest in actually catching Frank. The two of them, separated by the height of buildings and his willingness to speak to her, are alone.

She’s about to call out to him again when her phone rings.

Karen skids to a stop, panting.

“Hello?”

“Would you stop shouting my name halfway across the city?” 

“Maybe,” she gasps, “if you stick around.”

“Jesus, Karen.” His tone is so flat. Worse than angry, it’s just frustrated.

“Wait, don’t hang up. I just want to talk to you.” By contrast, she sounds absolutely desperate.

“About?”

“About everything I said the last time I saw you.”

“You taking it back?”

Karen sighs, as best she can breathing the way she is.

“No. But  . . .  I feel awful for just throwing it in your face like that. I wasn’t my best self.”

“You mean you were drunk.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I was. Can you forgive me?”

Frank sighs into the phone.

“Suppose that’d only be fair, since I was too when I shut you down and walked out.”

“Thank you,” she breathes. “. . . I see you?”

“I’m a little busy outrunning the cops, here.”

“You and I both know they only pretend to chase you. None of them have followed me.”

“True enough. There’s a diner four blocks west of where I am. You know it?”

He gives her the street.

“I’ll find it.”

**

He must shadow her all the way there, because he rattles down the fire escape of the building the diner is housed in almost precisely as she walks past.

“Keeping an eye on me?”

“This time of night, in this neighborhood? What do you think?” He retorts. Karen smiles.

“Thanks for that, then. And for meeting me.”

Frank looks askance, shrugs his shoulders. “Don’t mention it too much.”

He steps ahead of her to open the door to the diner. It’s a grimy place with peeling brown linoleum and shoddily patched walls, but everything behind the counter is clean and gleaming, and the tables—if not their ancient condiment holders—have been wiped down. The foggy windows are even comforting, in their own way. They make the place feel sheltered without turning it claustrophobic. It’s not the kind of place she’d have gone on her own, but with Frank, it almost feels natural—the pang of alarm as her last adventure with Frank and a diner flashes before her eyes included.

They take a table near the back. Frank orders coffee. Karen takes water, with a lemon.

“So,” she begins, resisting the urge to fidget in her chair, closing her hands around her glass, “what was that back there?”

All Karen had seen when she’d arrived was a still smoldering building and a fleet of firetrucks arranged around the shrapnel of torn out walls and shattered windows.

“Warehouse full of crack and the scum who sell it.”

“You just . . . _blew up_ a warehouse full of god knows how much crack.”

“Saved the DEA some paperwork. I was feeling generous.”

Karen snorts.

“Right, I’m sure that was your motive.”

He looks at her sharply.

“I mean,” she hurries to correct. “it can’t get into the wrong hands if you blow it up, can it? That’s probably what you were thinking.”

“No, it can’t,” he agrees, nodding once. His expression softens. His dark eyes search hers for a long moment, and something jolts in her chest. It’s a funny, sudden lurch she doesn’t quite know what to do with.

“For a second there,” he says, offering her an almost smile that turns the lurching feeling warm, “I thought you were gonna tell me I just like blowing things up.”

Karen grins. _I missed you_ , she realizes, as the warm spreads.

“Not what I was getting at, no . . . But you _do_ like blowing things up.”

“There is a special place in my heart for C4,” he concedes. Karen laughs.

“I guess I know what to get you for your next birthday.”

He shakes his head.

“If you really want to help me out, you’ll get me a stack of claymores.”

Karen, about to take a sip of her drink, sets her glass down. He’s being facetious, of course, in the sense of expecting _her_ to obtain such a thing, but his deadpan delivery is all genuine, frustrated desire.

“Isn’t that a kind of mine?” she asks.

“Yeah. ‘Front toward enemy,’ ever seen that in the movies? That’s a claymore.”

“It sounds kind of familiar, but that’s about all I know about them.”

“Directional antipersonnel mines full of shrapnel,” he offers.

“Charming,” she says. Frank shrugs and takes a long drink of his coffee.

“Effective,” he replies, setting the cup down. Karen shakes her head. It’s almost with amusement—almost.

“What have you been working on that you’ve managed to run out of mines in the middle of New York City, dare I ask?”

“You really wanna know that?”

She winces. “The exact details, maybe not.”

“Didn’t think so.”

**

Frank orders eggs. Karen orders a burger. For such an unpromising locale, the food is impressive. The fries are crisp enough on the outside and soft enough in the middle and seasoned so well that Frank takes one look at them before stealing one off of her plate. The waitress, a little woman with an accent Karen can’t place and a nametag that reads “Ianthe,” brings him his own plate shortly thereafter, smiling and waving away his reaching for his wallet.

For a while, they eat without speaking. Then they talk about nothing—Karen’s propensity for chasing after his messes (coincidental), how many blocks she’d run after him in those shoes (four), if that incident across the river had been his doing (maybe)—between bites until they run out of food, and out of small talk, and Frank, finger itching against the outside of his mug, starts eyeing the door.

Karen clears her throat.

“So, again, about what I said—” she begins. Frank shakes his head, and she stops, letting him speak instead. It’s the least she can do.

“Yeah, you really know how to fuck with a guys head, you know that?”

“That’s just it,” she says, leaning across the table and nearly toppling her glass. Frank catches it before she can. “I want you to know I wasn’t trying to fuck with you, or accuse you of anything.”

He cocks his head. “What were you trying to do, exactly?”

“Same thing I’m always trying to do: Understand you.”

“Yeah? I still don’t why you would you wanna do a thing like that.”

His trigger finger is working across the mug now in double time, back and forth, back and forth. Without thinking, Karen reaches out and lays her fingertips down across his knuckles, halting it. When she looks up at his face, his eyes are wary and startled. She doesn’t remove her hand.

“Just like I’ve said from the beginning. Because you’re more alive and more complicated than you let on, because you’re a good person, no matter what they say about you, and that means something to me.”

“Noble,” he say. “Doesn’t explain anything.”

“I also care, remember?”

“I still think if I had any sense I’d tell you to stop doing that.”

“I wouldn’t listen if you did, so you might as well save your breath.”

He chuckles, and shakes his head.

“What?” she says. Her hand is still on his.

“You. Said it before, I’ll say it again: Nothing scares you like it should.”

“Balls out,” she shrugs.

Frank laughs.

He moves his finger again, but it isn’t quite the same. It’s a single bend of his knuckle, as if he’s chasing after her fingertips as she pulls them away.

**

He walks her home, in a way.  He makes a pit-stop somewhere between the diner and the block where she parked her car, but he rejoins her again before she buckles in. He leans up against her window, and she unrolls it.

“Look,” he starts.

“I know.”

“You usually do.”

“Reporter,” she says, flashing her press pass, “it’s kind of my job.”

Frank snorts, and stares off down the street for a moment. He looks away, looks at her, looks away.

“. . . Don’t be too scarce, Frank,” she says, calling him back to her. “I like knowing you’re alive and well out there.”

“As well as I get, anyway,” he says. She knows it’s the closest he’ll ever to telling her she’d been right about him, the way he looks down as he says that, all the doubt hovering in his eyes, but she doesn’t really need to hear it said anymore, anyway. She already knows. Knows what he is, and how things rank in his world. Where his heart is.

“Be carful with  yourself,” he tells her, peeling himself away from the body of the car. “I care, too.”

_I know. I know I know._

Karen just smiles.

"Will do."


	14. Hollywood

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A thousand thanks to the tumblr anon who gave me the prompt for this chapter!!! Please keep them coming! (Prompts can be sent to our ask box over at queensofthekastle.tumblr.com.)

Karen would have been insulted by the assignment if it weren’t for the fact that Ellison had come to her so frazzled he almost ran into the wall on his way out. The puff piece he’d given her is the tritest shadow of journalism the Bulletin produces: movie reviews. But, in fairness, the only reason it became Karen’s problem is that the woman who was supposed to be writing had gone into labor quite literally _at her desk_ while Karen had been at lunch. And, given those circumstances, being assigned a puff piece isn’t so bad. (Unlike what she’d been saddled with three weeks ago, when Ellison heard she’d gone running after a gunman. He’d given her a week’s worth of crap over that.)

The only real issue with the piece is that it’s due on Friday, and it’s Wednesday now, and she still has a story of her own to work on. Which is how she ends up with tickets to an 8:00 pm showing of a children’s movie, and a 9:00 showing of a rom-com she’d never have seen on her own on a Wednesday night.

The text comes through at 8:05, halfway through the endless previews for the first film.

_< Where are you?>_

_< Movie theatre in midtown. Why?>_

_< Stay out of Queens tonight>_

_< Good to know.>_

It’s the first time she’s heard from Frank in a week. He’d texted her once to pick on her for the puff pieces, one other time to confirm she’d been nowhere near a building fire elsewhere in the Kitchen. So it’s surprising to her when her phone lights up again near the end of the first movie.

_< You at home yet?>_

_< Still at the movies. I have to watch 2 for a puff piece. Want to join me?>_

She texts him the name of the theater and the name of the movie, and doesn’t hear back.

**

Frank drops into a seat beside her and offers her a bucket of popcorn as if she should have been expecting him ten minutes into the second movie. She can already predict the ending.

“I can’t believe you’re watching this,” he tells her, at normal volume. They’re the only two people in the theatre. “The reviews suck.”

“It wasn’t my idea,” she says. “May went into labor and someone had to cover reviews.”

“And they picked you?”

She shrugs.

“I have a shorter story this week, no family to take care of after work, it made sense, I guess.”

“So it’s not another punishment for running around with me.”

“Or doing anything else stupid.”

Frank laughs, and settles back in his seat to watch the movie. But thirty minutes in, Karen realizes that he’s watching her more than the screen.

“Um,” she says, “can I help you?”

“Nope,” he says, “just counting how any times you’re going to roll your eyes.”

Karen groans.

“It’s so _bad,_ ” she hisses.

“I think I warned you about that.”

“I knew it would be bad, just not _this_ bad. I have seen a lot of rom-coms in my life and this is scraping the bottom of the barrel.”

Frank raises his eyebrows so high they look ready to escape from his face.

“You like these things?”

Karen laughs. “Not exactly. I loved chick flicks when I was a kid. I think I must have watched every single one that came out when I was in high school.”

“What changed?”

“I grew up, I guess. Realized the world doesn’t revolve around scripted kinds of love. And isn’t all that funny.”

“Funny is what you make it,” Frank says, shrugging. He offers her the popcorn again. She takes a handful.

“But nothing is really _comedy_ funny, you know? With a punch line and a laugh track. I actually can’t imagine laughing as often as she is,” Karen says, pointing at the lead actress on the screen. ”It’s just so . . . disingenuous.”

“I don’t think Hollywood is trying to tell you about the real world.”

“No—I know that. But I swear sometimes it’s just mocking me. I liked the last movie better.”

She stuffs some more popcorn in her mouth. Frank points out a piece that she’s dropped, clinging to her sweater. She sweeps it off.

“What was the last one?” he asks.

“A kid’s movie, actually.”

“Ah,” he says, smiling a little at something only he can see, staring up into the ceiling. “I like those.”

“Right? And they’re actually pretty honest. Simplified, but genuine. I think they’re charming.”

“Kind a funny, too . . . You know I used to take Lisa to the movies, when she was little. Maria made that my job.”

“She didn’t like kid’s movies?”

“Didn’t really like movies. I couldn’t get her through _The Godfather_ for the life of me.”

“But that’s a classic!”

“That’s what I told her!” he shakes his head. Smiles for a moment before it fades, and he turns his attention abruptly back to the movie.

“Sorry,” Karen whispers.

“Don’t be,” he says. “It’s not your fault where every memory ends up.”

She wishes desperately that she had something more to say to that, but finds nothing.

**

He leaves thirty minutes before the end of the movie, only after joining her in a game of predicting the inevitable conflict and climax of its slipshod plot: a nice, clean ending. Everyone ends up happy. Everything else, now, will be easy. Love is easy. Love is obvious. Love is insurmountable and uncompromising and simple. They’ll belong to each other, they’ll never doubt again, and nothing will ever mean more to them.

Maybe they’ll even have a baby, just to sweeten the deal, and they’ll be attentive, adoring parents, never missing a birthday or a school play. She’ll join the PTO. Maybe he’ll become a coach. Maybe, just to spice things up, they’ll have twins.

At some point, they will inevitably kiss in the rain, and it will be beautiful and dramatic and clean. Her lipstick will not smear. Her curls will not be crushed. She will not bite into his lip, and it will not bruise.

Karen tells Frank that she wishes she could cut out, too, as he stands to leave. He laughs and tells her that no, she doesn’t. So she doesn’t ask what’s happening in Queens. She does thank him for joining her. He leaves her the rest of the popcorn.

In the morning, Karen writes a review that’s more fair-minded than the movie deserves, and Ellison teases her about giving her the reviewer position permanently. He laughs when she blanches.


	15. Poetry

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For anyone wondering where on Earth I got the idea for a book of POEMS of all things, (that'll make sense once you read) I'd like to nullify your characterization doubts ahead of time by assuring you that the concept came directly from the comics--and from a Garth Ennis one-shot, no less. (The book in question is called The Tyger, for anyone who's curious about Frank as a kid and wants to toy with the idea of punishing as something that was previously modeled for him at an impressionable age.)

At the back of the library, tucked into a carrel behind the stacks, there is a dark-dressed man that patrons eye with wary scorn as they walk by. He has a large duffel bag with him. His jacket is a long cut, torn and re-stitched in places. A jacket that has seen work, and use. A baseball cap drips shadows down over his eyes. He has the dangerous look of someone outside of the norm, even for this city, in a way that Karen can’t place; and which draws her ever closer to him, curious, exploring, until she comes near enough to see his mouth—at which point she almost drops her books.

There’s a the rest of the way to him far too quickly, drifting quietly on her toes. His head jerks up to catch the motion. She wonders if it surprises him that the figure approaching, head cocked to peer under the brim of his hat, is a friend and not a threat.

“Frank?” she whispers, coming to sit beside him, “what are you doing here?”

 “Reading,” he says flatly. “I do that.”

His voice, hushed to a whisper, is lower than gravel, too rough too resonate, too smooth to snarl, softer and crisper than his normal register—not quite husky, though it unexpectedly ignites some carnal corner of her brain in much the same way. It flusters her. Her tongue ties up in her mouth, whatever intelligent response she might have had caught in the knot. She tries to speak, and nothing comes out. She closes her mouth. Clears her throat. Brushes her hair behind her ear, conscious of the fact that she’s not looking at him, mostly out of embarrassment, but to some small degree, out of confusion, too. That old idea of fucking him bursts for a second like a flashbang in her head before something else overwhelms it.

“That was a stupid question,” she struggles to whisper, glancing up at him again.

“Little bit,” he says.

“I guess I’m just not used to seeing you . . . out and around.”

“Being normal?”

Karen has to glance away from him again.

“Yeah. That. Which is . . . _really_ stupid.”

Frank grunts.

“Maybe, maybe not,” he says. He glances back at his book. Karen clears her throat again. for a moment she feels like she’s in a dream—the mortifying kind where she’s back in high school math, sitting at her desk naked with 30 pairs of teenage eyes on her, realizing she forgot to do her homework. The feeling of having made an ass of herself, and having come unprepared, somehow, is the same.

“Right,” she says. “Sorry.”

She begins to stand.

“Leaving?”

“I don’t want to bother you.”

“Sitting doesn’t bother me.”

Karen hovers in her chair, half in and half out. She already has what she came in here for, she’d been planning to sit down somewhere to read, anyway—there’s no reason not to stay. Then again, she doesn’t know why she _should_ stay to read in familial silence in a public space with a wanted felon as casually as two people skimming the paper over breakfast. But perhaps she doesn’t need a reason.

Which is how Karen ends up settling down to read beside the Punisher at 2:00 in the afternoon on an unseasonably warm Saturday in February.

At 4:00, he sets down his book.

“Did you finish that?” she asks.

“I was reading pieces. It’s not my first rodeo with Blake.”

“As in William Blake?”

He holds the book up off the table, pinching between his fingers without even lifting his hand all the way, to expose the cover. It is indeed a collection of poems.

“I didn’t know you liked poetry,” she says.

“Since I was a kid.”

“Do you write it?”

He laughs, a short sound a touch too loud for a library.

“Not really—not well,” he admits. “I had to write some in high school—they weren’t the worst in the class, weren’t the best. Wrote a few lines of shit for Maria when we were dating, too. All terrible. If she liked them it was because she thought it was cute, or some shit.”

The words, though self-depreciating, are warm.

Maybe Karen smiles then because he’s smiling, or maybe it’s just the concept that gets her, but as she needles him for more information—were they love poems, were they free verse, were they _awful,_ really that bad—her face feels after a while as if it’s going to split in half. If she were trying, she couldn’t manage a wider grin.

**

They walk out of the library arguing. A mediocre poet, Frank insists, is worse than a bad poet. Karen can’t comprehend it.

“But bad poetry is just painful!”

“Bad poetry is bad poetry. You know it’s bad, you don’t read it. Mediocre poetry is disappointing. It doesn’t deserve it, but there it is written and published like it’s something to appreciate.”

“Mediocre poetry is at least readable.”

“Bullshit. It’s smoke and fucking mirrors. Really average poems don’t say shit, they don’t mean shit. They’re just words—write them as an essay or a speech or a novel or a poem, doesn’t matter—a bad poem is at least trying to be a _poem._ ”

“I can’t believe we’re having this discussion. Bad is bad. Good is good,” Karen declares, shaking her head. Frank snorts, and then mirrors the gesture, but lifts it, raising his chin and staring up into a sky turning shades of blue and orange evening.

“Bad poetry,” he says, “can still have _heart.”_

Karen stops short, pausing on the library stairs, one foot a step below the other. Frank stops a step further down, turning to stare at her.

“What?”

Karen stutters.

“I don’t know,” she lies. Really, though she’d never say this, what’s gotten her is a single, stray phrase in her mind. A wandering thought. _You, Frank Castle, are a poem. A tragic, living poem._

Perhaps that’s why she likes reading into him so much.

He stares at her a while longer.

“You need help with something?” His heavy brows are knitting. There’s a wary glint in his so-very-dark eyes. Those warm, sad brown eyes. Karen shakes her head.

“I’m good,” she says, continuing down the stairs. “Just a weird thought.”

Frank lets her walk on ahead, staring holes into her back. Karen Page is no poem, but she feels for a moment, as she walks away from him, as though she is also being read.

 


	16. Tip

Karen locks the door to her office before making the call.

“If this is a pocket dial,” Frank grunts when he answers. She’s woken him again. Karen breathes out her hushed explanation as quickly as she can.

“No, it’s a tip: I think I found something on the remaining trafficking rings in New York.”

The sound of movement fills the phone. She pictures Frank sitting up in the cot he calls a bed.

“What kind of something?”

“Something fishy in the Port Authority. I’m still working on the details, but their books are all over the place. What’s being shipped out of Hell’s Kitchen and how many shipments are coming in don’t match up at all.”

“How far does it go?”

“That’s what I’m going to find out. I can’t tell if it’s being orchestrated at the top, or if someone underneath isn’t reporting certain shipments. What I _do_ know for sure is that at least some of the discrepancies show up like clockwork—that’s how I found it. If this pattern holds true, then a shipment is coming in tomorrow night.”

Frank breathes into the phone.

“Then they’ll be prepping tonight. Which pier?”

Karen shakes her head even though he can’t see her. “I don’t know. I have a name, though: Arthur Moro. He’s low, low on the totem pole, but he’s filed more than one questionable report. I think that if we can find out where he’s going to be tonight, we’ll find out who it is that needs him to be there.”

**

Someone bangs against the car window, and Karen screams. Frank ducks into view. He’s got that look on his face, dangerous and dark and distant, the way he looks just before he does something that she doesn’t want to see: not Frank’s face, but the Punisher’s. Karen unrolls the window.

“What are you doing?” he demands.

“Steaking out the pier. Moro has the night shift. If he comes out of that building,” she points at the offices where he ought to be stationed, “I want to know.”

“Go home, Karen.”

“No. I want to make this stop, too. Besides, if you just go and beat the tar out of him, everyone he’s working with will know that something is wrong. If you stop to do . . . whatever you need to do to whoever he’s meeting with, someone needs to know where he goes and who he notifies.”

“All I’m doing tonight is recon.”

“Your recon isn’t always gentle and you and I both know it.”

Frank—or the vengeful god that wears Frank’s face and the death’s head emblazoned vest—stares down at her.

“I’m not going anywhere,” she tells him. “Either you can take me with you or you can leave me here, but I am not going home.”

Frank stands back from the car.

“Fine,” he says. “Get out. No one needs to find you here.”

Karen rolls up the window, and steps out.

“Don’t talk to me like that,” she warns him. “Uncovering this . . . this . . . atrocity is my job, too.”

“Is being reckless in your job description, too?”

“It’s implied.”

Frank shakes his head, and walks off. Karen follows after, shadowing him. He has a shotgun slung over his shoulder. Karen has a recorder in her pocket.

Frank glances back at her.

“You’re not dressed for this.”

“I came from work.”

“You worked on this all night?”

“Of course I did.”

He eyes her steadily, walking without looking where he’s going, for a long moment before speaking. When he does, it’s curt.

“Stay close.”

**

Karen draws the line at trying to climb up a shipping container after him. She also draws the line at listening to him when he tells her to stay exactly where he has to leave her to gain the vantage point he wants. She creeps away as soon as he’s atop the container.

Karen snakes between long rows of crates, edging away from—and then towards—every sound that she hears. At some point, the heavy but hazy, semi-rhythmic sound of the water lapping at the pier, of things shifting in the current, of the pier groaning beneath her feet against the tide, blurs into something indistinct and rapid, the cadence all wrong for water. The sound is low and detailed, a complicated texture rubbing up on her eardrums. Voices.

Karen ducks between two containers, and listens.

The speakers are both male.

“1:00.”

“It’ll be clear by 12:30. How long do you need?”

“No more than an hour. If they misbehave, they go in the river. I’m not wasting time on them: there are more where they came from.”

“That seems like a waste.”

“Did I fucking ask you how to do my job? Get the pier clear, and you get what we agreed on. Step on my toes, and we renegotiate. You got one fucking job, and a trained fucking monkey could do it, capiche?”

“Yeah, yeah, ok, I got it. Dead girls go in the river, good girls go to work, get the fucking pier clear. It’ll be ready.”

“It’d better be.”

That’s the end of it. Two sets of footsteps retreat in some direction she can’t determine, the sound distorted by the hard corners and corrugated edges of crate upon crate upon wood upon water, which is why there’s nowhere to go by the time she realizes that one set of steps is coming toward _her._

Karen freezes. She has two choices: out into the pen space between rows of crates, or back down the narrow crevice she’s already standing in. Glancing backward reveals that, at the end of the passage, another crate sits perpendicular to the two Karen is sandwiched between—a dead end.

The footsteps are coming fast.

Karen pulls in a long breath, and holds it. She inches a step further down the passage, away from what little illumination the dull yellow lighting on the pier provides. One step. Two steps. Three. Silence.

And then noise, horrible in her quiet hiding place: a sharp squeal and scurrying, scratching motion and a dull, dull sound of flesh against metal as Karen yanks her foot off the tail of the rat she’s just stepped on. The rodent, a massive city rat with a damp coat and teeth that could take off her toe right through her flats, bolts from between the crates before her foot can come down again. Beyond her hiding place, a man yelps. Then growls.

“Fucking vermin,” he mutters.

Karen holds her breath, her hand over her mouth, struggling to achieve the very limits of human silence as she shrinks into the shadows.

It’s not enough.

A lean, mean-eyed and bright blond man’s face peers around the edge of the crate, inspecting the ground for more fleeing rodents, gaze landing on Karen’s feet.

“What the _fuck?_ ”

“I—”

He charges down between the crates, grabs her arm, and yanks it halfway out of the socket. He drags her into the open.

“Who are you?” he demands, twisting her arm behind her. Karen shouts. “ _Who are you?”_

“My name is Jane,” she stutters, breathing through the piercing pain in her shoulder, relying on the genuine terror in her voice to uphold her lie, “my boyfriend works nights on the pier, I was just coming to see—”

“Bullshit,” the man—the slaver—hisses, and he reaches around her neck. The lanyard on which she wears her press pass— _stupid, stupid, why are you still wearing that?—_ tights across her neck, yanking her head back. Karen gurgles, and coughs.

“ _Fuck!”_ He spits.

The slaver smashes her against a crate. The air tries to leave her lungs, a pang in her chest. The metal rings out like an ugly, muted gong. _Thank God. Please have heard that—Frank—_

The slaver has her in a chokehold, and he’s crushing her windpipe closed.

“What do you know, huh? What the fuck do you think you know?”

“Nothing,” she gags, “I heard . . . maybe . . . corruption in the . . . Port Authority . . . I just came . . . I just . . . trying . . . to investigate . . . didn’t. . . find—”

“You’re fucking lying. You stupid bitch, you—”

Karen can feel herself going blue. Her head is spinning. She imagines that somewhere in the distance, in the other direction, she can her the clang of heavy footsteps across containers.

She brings her hands up behind her, and reaches for his waist.

She yanks the slaver forward.

Expecting her to push away, the slaver stumbles right into her raised heel. Karen kicks him as high and as hard as she can, bringing her knee so far forward for the wind-up that she bangs it against the crate before the kick. The slaver yelps, and his knees give out, yanking Karen to the ground. She elbows him as hard as she can in the ribs, and his arms go slack just long enough for her to flex her neck, find his arm, and bite down until she tastes copper. _Oh god . . ._

The slaver yanks his arm back, all instinct, and Karen rolls away.

She doesn’t wait. She jumps to her feet and bolts. She’s going the wrong way, away from the distant footsteps, purely because it’s the direction she fell. She _needs_ to turn around. She needs to let Frank catch up. She can’t: the slaver is on his feet again. He’s limping around his aching genitals, bleeding from the arm, but he’s after her all the same, and the row of shipping containers goes on forever, and there’s nowhere to go—

But in.

Karen skids to a stop, scrambling to turn around so fast that she loses her balance, crashing down on her left hip before struggling back to her feet and running, running like she’s never run in her _life,_ in the direction of the slaver.

There’s an open crate to her right, and she dives for it. So does he.

Karen jams her knees coming to a halt. The slaver is already inside, fooled by the feint. He leans out, bewildered and _snarling_ , head peeking out of the crate, just around the door, the door Karen is sheltered behind, the heavy, metal door—

Karen slams her shoulder into it with every ounce of her body weight and every fiber of her muscle. The slaver tries to retract, too late.

He falls to the ground, overcome by gravity with nothing left of him to hold him up, a visible collapse in the side of his skull.

 


	17. Purging

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are few notes of thanks (and an element of sappy-ness) that I need to throw out there before this chapter:
> 
> The first goes to Purelyfueledbycaffeine on tumblr for reminding me about the continued relevancy of the slavers theme from earlier chapters, which is what gave me the idea for this segment in the first place.
> 
> The second goes out to out to Tristinai on AO3 for a wonderful comment way back on chapter 12 that talked about how "Breaking" had a climactic element to it, because it got me thinking about how it WAS a climax . . . for Frank. Which is how I ended up pondering what an emotional climax might look like for Karen. (Not that there isn't more rising action yet to come in the story, of course.)
> 
> The third thanks is a general one that goes for EVERYONE who has left comments and kudos thus far. You folks get me thinking and keep me motivated, and confident. I love to write ships that are complex and bittersweet and imperfect, but as a general rule, those interpretations haven't been well received (or at least widely well received) in any of my previous fandoms. But you all? You've been wonderful about it. So, that said, I just want to say a GIANT THANK YOU to the Kastle fandom for being the single most supportive, open minded, in-character-appreciative fandom I've ever been in, and let you all know that--while I don't always have an intelligent response to comments and don't always reply to them--that every single comment and kudos this fic receives makes my day, keeps me going, and makes this one of the most worthwhile fics I've ever written. Thanks so much for all the support, and here's hoping you enjoy what's to come!

Frank dives off of a crate a couple meters away and stops. What must she look like, she wonders, standing over a man from a few feet back, staring endlessly down into the dent in his temple from above. He landed face first, and has not gotten up. He’s bleeding from somewhere, very slowly. Maybe his nose.

“What happened?” Frank grunts.

“He found me listening. I ran. He chased me inside—he tried to chase me inside. I hit him in the door when he came out, I—”

Karen can feel herself wavering. The words sound airy, almost as airy as her head. Her brain is closing in on itself, leaving nothing behind but empty space.

“Shit,” Frank says, and he drops his gun. He stalks over to her—strides—she can’t read the movement, his face, can’t look at anything directly except the slaver on the ground and his concave temple. Frank reaches out very gently to place his hands on her upper arms, placing himself between Karen and the slaver. He tries to pivot her away. She refuses to move. She can’t.

“Karen.”

“I hit him with the door.”

“Karen, hey. Hey, focus on me.”

“I heard him, before. 1:00 tomorrow morning. And then he found me and he knew I’d heard. I hit him . . .”

Something closes around Karen’s jaw. Warm. A little rough. Big, wrapped all around her face, from her temple to her chin. Pressure on her chin, guiding it gently upwards. A thumb. Frank’s other hand is still on her arm, but her face is in his palm. Her face is safely in his palm. Cradled in his palm.

“Karen, hey. Look at me. You did good.”

“I hit him.”

“It sounds like you had to.”

“I—I’ve done it again. I . . . hit him. Like Wesley. I didn’t even hesitate, Frank, _I hit him.”_

“Yeah, and now you’re in shock. C’mere.”

Frank drops her long enough to shrug off his jacket. He tries to hand it to her. Karen can’t even lift her arms. The slaver is laying at her feet. His head is pulp. Karen is whispering, over and over, she can’t stop. _I hit him._ Her only instinct now is to run. But he’d touched her—her DNA is under his nails, in his clothes. He needs to go in the river. She has to pick him up—

She tries to look at him, and Frank pulls her around. She stumbles over her feet, and he holds her up.

“There’s no gun to throw out this time.”

“Not that we need to get rid of,” Frank says.

He drapes his jacket over her shoulders. Karen stands there. Blank. But she can feel her feet, now. She’s conscious of reorganizing them to stand more steadily on her own. She’s aware of the pain in her hip from where she fell and the aching in both knees, the left one especially. From the crate. She’s aware of the jacket, so big around her too-skinny shoulders. She gropes for the sleeves. She doesn’t want to drop it—the slaver’s blood is on the ground.

Frank looks her over, and steps back. When she doesn’t collapse, he pulls out a pistol. A heavy one. A .45. He points it at the slaver’s head.

“He’s not going to come back from this,” he tells her, “he’s not going to come after you.”

Karen lunges for Frank’s arm.

“No!”

Frank refuses to let his arm fall, even with her hanging on it. He looks away from her and back, nervous, involuntary, his eyes all scrutiny and worry in the dim yellow light.

“He just tried to do god knows what to you and you want to let him—“

“No.” Karen whispers. Her voice is frigidly cold. “I mean. _I_ hit him. If he’s—I have to . . . I have to know.”

Frank lowers the gun, and watches her for a moment. Finally, he nods. He motions toward the slaver.

“You wanna do it?”

She should do it. She should reach down and find out if she’s become a murderer, again. She should kneel on the unforgiving ground and press her fingers into his neck and feel. Should bend over him and listen for bubbling, bleeding breathing. She should. _She_ hit him.

“I—” she whispers, “I don’t know I don’t know if I can.”

Her eyes prickle and burn. Her sore throat feels too full. She should do it. She should—she doesn’t. “I don’t think I can.”

Frank nods and bends down for her. He extends two fingers toward the slaver’s jugular, ready to seek a pulse. But he stops short.

“You know he’s as good as dead anyway,” he mutters. “You call him an ambulance, maybe he bleeds out, maybe he doesn’t. Either way his skull’s skewering his brains.”

For the first time, a choke escapes Karen’s throat. It’s not a sob, not yet, rather the strangled, tearless sound that could at any moment become one. Frank looks up at her, and waits. She covers her mouth to stop the sound. Her eyes are hot, her throat so full she can’t speak without swallowing air to clear it, gasping twice before she can say “ok.”

Frank stands without checking the slavers pulse, and turns to walk away.

“Let’s go,” he says.

“Are you just going to leave him?”

“You don’t want to watch me do anything else.”

He takes a step. Karen does not follow. She looks after him, at the slaver, back at him.

“Yes I do,” she whispers. Frank turns around. “Yes I do.”

He looks at her for a long moment, then nods.

“Step back.”

Karen vomits. Not right away—first she watches. Frank pulls out the .45 agin and puts one slug through the back of the slaver’s skull. His head bursts. Blood spatters outward and Karen stumbles a step further away, hands clenched at her side, a fiercer-than-ever stinging in her eyes. Her face goes cold, all the blood drained out of it. She grits her teeth, doesn’t cover her mouth again, and she cries out despite herself. And then the acid swells up her throat, a pressure moves into her esophagus from her stomach, and she lunges, tripping and running, through a space between crates to the edge of the water, and empties her stomach violently into the Hudson.

Frank comes up behind her slowly. One long, heavy step at a time. He brushes her hair back over her shoulder as she wretches, her entire torso convulsing, trying to purge bigger, more appalling things than the gore itself.

**

Frank drives her home in her own car. She rides in silence, hands folded in her lap, staring straight forward, watching the road pass under them. Karen lets him walk her to her apartment, guide her onto her couch, wrap a blanket around her though she’s still in his coat, and bring her a glass of water. She doesn’t say a word until he sits down beside her, glancing every which way, down and then back at her, forearms resting on his knees so that he’s looking almost up at her.

“I didn’t even stop to think if it would kill him,” she finally croaks.

“No time.”

“Yes there was,” she says. “I could have locked him in. Something. But I didn’t even think.”

“That’s instinct.”

“Is it? Frank, I hit him so hard . . . I . . .” her voice fades to a whisper, the words like a breath, her mind too static to admit to herself that she’s said them at all. “What if I wanted him dead?”

“No big deal if you did. Makes sense you’d want a shitbag like that gone.”

“Because I’m one bad day away from being you?”

“Shit,” Frank says, shaking his head hard, looking at her too urgently, “no. Because he deserved it. If you were like me, you’d be better at it. You’d do this right. You—you might want it. But you don’t like it—just look at you. You think I’m in love with it? Fuck, maybe. But that’s sure as hell not you. For you it’s justice. You wanna fix things. Protect people. Sometimes that includes you, sometimes it doesn’t.”

“I wasn’t just protecting myself out there. I was killing him.”

“You keep saying that. _So what_?”

“Doesn’t that make me as much a monster as he is?”

Frank sits bolt upright so fast she flinches.

“Bullshit,” he snaps. “You can’t believe that, not for a second. That’s the thing about you—you don’t believe in gods and heroes and monsters. You say you do, but you don’t. You live in the world. You say things are good or bad or right and wrong, but you don’t mean it. You see the good in bad. Just look who you’re talking to. And you see the bad in the good. Broken systems, unfinished stories, you get that. You make like your world is all black and white and you’re trying to be some kind of bringer of light, you’re not. You fucking get it. You’re good, you’re bad. Same as the rest of us. The scum I kill—you think I don’t know they have families? Have lives? I know. But I make a choice. I make a judgement. I look at what they all add up to and I ask myself if what they do to this whole city, hell, this whole country, outweighs what I’m about to do to them and that family. And you do the same damn thing. Only difference is, that right and wrong you want to believe in still tears you up when your judgement call comes.”

Karen stares at him, stricken. Whatever she might have expected him to say, this isn’t it. This is so far from it. It makes her heart ache.

“Look,” he continues, softer now. “You _want_ to feel remorse about it. You tell yourself you want to punish yourself. You put your nose in a glass of whiskey and try not to feel anything else. It hurts you to hurt people.  But it doesn’t mean you don’t know how the world works. It just means that when you come out of your dream of this clean cut world and get back down here on the ground with the rest of it, you cry instead of smile. Only monster you are is the human kind, and that doesn’t count for shit. That’s all of us. And you’re better than most of us—you fix things. Doing that is never gonna make you wrong. You get that? You’re as good as people get.”

“That’s not true.” Karen snaps her hanging head up. “I _hurt_ someone. _I’ve killed people._ And I don’t hate myself for it, that’s—”

“Good, don’t.”

“But I wish I did.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s horrifying! I’m not even  . . . mad at myself. I don’t . . . oh god, I don’t regret it. I’d do it again,” she has to pause, cover her mouth and stifle some ugly, saddened sound. “Don’t tell me that’s ok, don’t tell me that’s just human nature. How can that be what it means to be human? There has to be something better. There has to be.”

“And that’d the difference between you and me. You. Are not. A monster. You told me that once. If it was true for me—if it was even a little true for me, it’s true for you.”

Karen remembers.

“You sure about that?” she whispers. She quotes him.

Then the tears come. A thick hiccup breaks loose from her throat and a heavy sob follows, and her eyes finally, finally overflow. She doubles over, her face in her hands, and sobs. Because she wants to believe him. She wants to believe her own words. She wants to believe that this changes nothing, that there is nothing to make amends for. She wants to pretend there isn’t a body at the bottom of the Hudson because he helped her put it there. But she can’t. And she can’t believe it. What is true for him _isn’t_ true for her—the blood on her hands is an entirely different color. It doesn’t come from justice.

“Whoa,” Franks says, the sound a whisper. He leans in close to her. “Hey there. Hey. Hey, hey . . .”

“Even if I’m not,” she sobs, “even if I’m not I—I can’t— This world—its so broken and I don’t want to see it and I want it to be right and . . . you’re right, I want to fix it all and I can’t. How can I? I can’t even fix me. I’m a mess, I’m a murderer, I’m—“

“Don’t even finish that sentence. You’re good. Better than 99% of this city, your red friend included. He’ll of a lot better than me.”

“But—”

“But nothing. Now you listen to me: you made mistakes, right? Now you think you’ve gotta make up for all of them, never mess up anything again, but it doesn’t work like that. Don’t do that to yourself. You don’t deserve it.”

“But what if I do?”

“You don’t.”

His words are so unforgivingly final she can hardly understand what possesses her to lurch toward him for a moment, overcome with an urge to continue her crying into the rough Kevlar of his vest. She stops herself before she can.

“Karen,” he murmurs, a beat later. “Hey. Look at me.  I need you to get this: You’re good—fuck, you’re too good. And you don’t have to make up for shit. Not for this. Not for anything. You got that?”

All Karen can do is cry for a long time, reeling from his words, from the realization that there is blood spatter on her pants. That had to kill another man, that someone like Matt would condemn her for that. That she's already condemning herself--despite what she actually feels. Despite the ugly truth of herself.

She knows, now, how he felt that night on her couch when she carved him open and made him look at himself. At what he loved. He’s just done it to her, with what she hates. And now it’s all leaking out, in sob after sob after sob until her lungs can’t take it and her eyes go dry and all it becomes is silent near-hiccups.

Frank sinks to his knees on the floor in front of her.

“Look, Karen . . .”

“You need to go. Go.”

“Are you gonna be ok?”

She nods, shaking her hair into a curtain over her face. Her scalp tickles as the back of his hand brushes curls away. He takes her hair gingerly, tracing the arch of her ear, brushing a cracked knuckle across her temple. His hand lingers beside her cheek when he’s done—not touching it—for a moment too long. And he watches her, looking like he _wants_ to touch her. The hand so close to laying down along her jaw again, maybe running a thumb back and forth across her cheek—the possibility is there, a cautious, muted glimmer in his eyes, and she wishes he would act on it.

Instead he stands to leave.

Once the door closes behind him, Karen floats down into the couch to lie on her side, knees curled up to her chest. She stays there, wondering who and what she is, for some indeterminable span of time before a dead sleep finally overcomes her. Unlike Wesley, she has no nightmares about the slaver.


	18. Network

_< Meeting still on.>_

_< Tell me everything that happens.>_

Karen isn’t sure if he texts her because he wants her to know that killing the slaver didn’t ruin their investigation, or if it’s because business, his work, is all he knows. His work and, it would seem, the inner workings of her mind. In the most uncomfortable way.

 _You are a hero,_ she’d written once.

She’d been trying to tell herself. And for a while, watching Frank, she’d believed it. Back when she'd been convinced that it wasn’t love that drove him. But it was. And he’d chosen a path. And it had broken her heart to know what people can become. That heroes have agendas. But she’d written it anyway: _You are a hero._

Karen doesn’t feel like a hero. A survivor, maybe. Not a hero. And not whatever Frank is, either. She doesn’t have her own code of ethics. She doesn’t rebel against the law as it exists, in all its impotence. She questions it, she doesn’t fight it. Still: _You are a hero._ She’d wanted to believe it, she’d wanted to believe it despite everything. But she’d known, and Frank was right--There are no heroes. There are only humans, and other humans to fight against them.

_You are a hero._

She is a _person_. Just like those girls she and Frank are trying, maybe too late, to save. A person. That fact either makes no difference at all, or means all of the difference in all of the world, and she doesn’t know what to think of it.

She pulls Frank’s jacket closer around her shoulders. Karen had taken the day off of work, claiming food poisoning, and stayed at home, staring down at the bloody slacks she’d shed, still in her blouse, her press pass, and Frank’s coat. At some point she’d managed to take off the rest of her clothes and shower, the jacket abandoned on the couch, but she’d shrugged it back over herself later—when exactly, she doesn’t remember. She clutches at it as she stares into her apartment wall, pondering people, and what to do about them. What she’s already decided to do about them, by sending that text.

Frank comes by at 3:40 in the morning. He brings the dinner she never thought to have. It’s not spaghetti, but burgers. Greasy, meaty, American burgers with a side of fries that constitutes a whole meal on its own. She and Frank sit at the kitchen table, Karen struggling to fit the burger into her mouth while Frank wheels his absently and one handed as he speaks, and talk about the Port Authority, about his hit on the slavers, about the five Latvian girls he’d delivered safely to a social worker in the back of a stolen van.

Five girls, at the cost of an unknown number of victims to come. The men Frank interrogated didn’t know what he needed to know, and the trail she’d been following in the first place, he tells her, has abruptly gone cold as the bottom of the Hudson. But there are other things he brings her for her report. Inconsistencies in immigration services, a tip from their social worker ally. Missing women right here in New York. New ports.

Together, over burgers, they piece together the network.

“If we can’t save every girl that’s already here, at least maybe we can keep some from coming in,” Karen says. She can’t quite look at him, aware that his eyes are searching her with sympathetic, unrelenting dedication, so warm and so intense and so protective and concerned—so many things she can’t decide if she wants, or deserves. She focuses on his jacket, tossed across the table between them, instead.

“They’ll take them elsewhere,” Frank replies. It’s the first concession he’s made all night about their chances. The deeper their map of the human trafficking network goes, the more jaded he becomes. Karen looks up at him at last to find his expression cold. As if to compensate, some spark burns brighter in her.

“Not if we send what we find to the FBI.”

Frank snorts.

“You want to forward your story, that a felon helped you build, to the FBI.”

“I’ve been thinking about it since this afternoon. I at least want to call them out. If the two of us can do at least this much, where are they? They’re an entire bureau.”

“They’re using softer methods than I am.”

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: at least your methods work.” _Our methods._

Frank says nothing to that, but looks at her for a long time.

**

“You ok?”

He says it when he ought to leaving, burger long gone, dawn creeping into the window. Karen has to look away for a heartbeat before she can answer him.

“I don’t feel good, if that’s what you mean. But I think I appreciate it, everything you said. That was . . . brutally honest. And it was true. Or at least, I’m trying to believe it was all true. And about what I did . . . I don’t know. But I can’t undo it, can I?”

“No, you can’t. But look—I probably should have just told you it would be alright and left it.”

“No,” Karen exclaims, looking as far into his eyes as biology will let her see. “I’m glad someone finally said all of that. It was what I needed to hear, not what I wanted. I appreciate that—more than I can say, actually. It got me thinking.”

Again, she has to look away. Frank stands to go with another nod, but steps toward rather than away. She wonders if he’ll touch her again. Brush her hair back, cup her face.

“You sure you’re good?”

Karen glances at him, and nods. Though she finds it hard to swallow as she does. Frank turns toward the door.

“Frank?”

He stops to look at her. _Please stay—_

“Thanks for checking in.”

“Don’t mention it,” he says. And then he’s out the door. It hurts her heart to wonder how long he’ll be gone.


	19. Eden

Something changes after that night. It takes her awhile to realize what. It’s not just that he coaches her  through her uncertainties, now that he’s exposed them—though that _is_ an entirely new facet to the nebulous relationship between them—but something deeper. Some kind of fundamental shift.

It’s in the early hours of the morning, on a cold day in January, while she’s sitting on top of the closed lid of her toilet, hammering away on her laptop while Frank is perched on the edge of the tub with a tampon (her idea) crammed up his heavily bleeding, broken nose, that she’s able to put her finger on what it is.

As he laughs at her frustrated cycling between typing, deleting, typing, deleting, as he asks her what’s _really_ wrong, she realizes that she’s never been _seen_ before. Not really, not clearly. Ben, at least, had _known_ her, but then, he’d still had to investigate her. He’d been curious. He’d been wondering.

Frank just _sees_ her, though. Sees right through her soul and her intentions and the pieces of herself that she’d rather not see, and it leaves her feeling naked—but not exposed. It’s _freeing._ These days she finds herself regularly telling him things she barely tells herself—about the _anger,_ the _rage,_ the _hate_ even, that she feels for some of the things she reports on. She pours them into Frank, digging down under her righteousness, her empathy, all the wholesomeness and caring she’s still capable of, reaching for the things that fester underneath. And he shakes his head and wonders over her. Tells her that she’s good, that she’s so good, that she wouldn’t be human if she didn’t feel those ugly things, too.

“You look like an angel,” he tells her that day in the bathroom, beautiful words so incongruous with the blood on his face and the string trailing out his nose. “Like one of those old, renaissance paintings. Like the walls of churches.”

“Frank, what on Earth . . .”

“That doesn’t mean you gotta act like one. That shit you’re feeling, it’s normal. Hell, it’s probably healthy. Would you feel any better if you just didn’t care about that shit? If it never bothered you?”

“No, I suppose not.”

“See?” he says, “You get it. So don’t let it fuck with you so much—you’re angry, be angry. Write it all down.”

And it goes like that. Sometimes when he tells her these things he looks at her like there’s something else that he’s not saying, but she doesn’t push it. His observations are his own, though she wonders, at this point, how spot on his impression of her would be if she asked him to do it. She never does.

**

The next time she sees Frank, be brings her something. It’s wrapped in brown butcher paper, taped neatly.

“Don’t tell me you bought me a steak,” she says. “It’s not even my birthday.”

“I missed your birthday.”

“So is that what this is?” she asks as she takes it. The package is square, a little bit flexible, though not enough so to sag in her hand.

Frank shrugs.

Karen eyes him for a moment, looking him up and down, scanning his face. She’s on the couch and he’s standing over her, so it’s a long way up to look, the whole broad expanse of his chest in her way. Her eyes snag, for a moment, on the stark lines of shadow and light playing across his neck, before she turns her attention to the package.

She digs a cautious nail under the tape, peeling it away from the paper, the paper away from the gift. The butcher paper crackles as it opens up to reveal the back cover a book peppered with praise for Steinbeck. The title scrawled across the front reads _East of Eden._ The book has that somehow smooth, somehow soft quality of paperbacks. It feels pleasant in her hands.

“Thank you,” she says.

“Have you ever read it?”

“Not yet.”

She doesn’t ask him out loud why this book, why for her, though she’s sure he can see the question in her eyes. If he offers her a silent answer, she can’t make it out.

It’s not until days later that she turns a page to discover a neat band of black ink—complimentary to the page—drawn in beneath a line to highlight it:

“ _And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.”_

**

Frank opens the door with a pistol in his hand. Blue, the dog looking slightly less intimidating that she remembers for having gotten ever so slightly plump, snarls behind him.

“What are you—” Frank begins, and Karen stops him. She stands up on her toes, surges toward him, and wraps her arms around his shoulders. Frank goes so stiff she wonders if he’ll drop the gun. Blue barks. Karen props her chin atop his shoulder and squeezes him into her.

“Easy, boy,” Frank stutters at the dog. Karen laughs.

She releases him more slowly than she’d approached him, watching his eyes. They’re unfathomable. Wide and staring.

“That was a _thank you_ ,” she tells him.

“You came all the way out here for that.”

His safe house—his preferred one, the one she’s slept in—is far outside the city.

“I did. Have a nice day, Frank.”

He shakes his head.

“You’re out of your mind,” he tells her.

“So are you.”

He snorts.

“Fair. At least come in. The dog missed you.”

Karen comes in, sits down, feeds Blue a piece of chicken from a half-eaten sandwich laying out atop a stack of footlockers. Frank offers her coffee, and goes back assembling the gun that’s spread out in pieces across the safe house’s one table. He tries to teach her how to check a scope. Karen stays for an hour.


	20. Gametime

There were only so many places it could go from where they started, she consoles herself as her heart starts hammering against the inside of her chest. Frank—the cause of the palpitations—is perched on the coffee table across from her, wrapping a bandage around her palm. It’s a minor injury, the risk of tetanus aside. She’d gotten it coming down a fire escape, nothing major. It’s the kind of injury she could explain at work with minimal eye rolling or questioning. But frank wraps it up as if he’s repairing a crack in the Sistine chapel, and he keeps looking up at her every few seconds as he does, and his _eyes_ , a little chastising, and so afraid of hurting her, are making her vision swim far more than his poking and prodding at her palm.

She shouldn’t react like this. She’s always found him attractive, in one way or another, this is nothing new, but the urge to reach out and touch his face while it’s so close to her hand, is very, very new. This isn’t like the night she realized she could fuck him. This is something else. This is something that pangs in her chest when he touches her, and it shouldn’t be there. Not with everything she knows about him. But she’s been seeing him more and more, lately. There are nights he sleeps on her couch for no apparent reason at all. She’s been getting used to having him close. Starting to wonder about having him closer, the thought flickering in her mind every time she wakes him up with her alarm clock and his groaning makes her smile.

“Get a day job or your own house, if you don’t like it,” she tells him.

“But you have cable.”

“What does Frank Castle watch on cable?”

“Shark week, for one.”

He’d been absolutely serious, too. She’d come home one day and found him sprawled across her couch with popcorn at six in the evening, enraptured by some show about jumping great whites that reminded Karen of her childhood fascination with jaws.

And it’s not the first think like that he’s done.

Really, _really,_ she promises herself, it’s out of her control. It was inevitable that so many little moments like those would add up to something like this, for better or for worse.

Probably worse. She knows what Frank is. And she knows the limits of his love, the capacity of his heart. He could never love her. Not all the way. She _knows_ that. But here she is, anyway, thanking a god she only half believes in for the fact that he can’t hear her heartbeat like Matt does.

“You sure you’re ok?” he asks, tying off the bandage.

“Yeah,” she says. It sounds a little breathless.

“You got a weird look on your face.”

“Probably the expression that comes from realizing I am the only idiot in the world who could run from a story-turned-shootout, no problem, only to cut herself up on a handrail.”

“You do have incredible luck.”

“Tell me about it.”

He laughs a little as he releases her hand. She wants to grab his fingers, keep him from letting go. She doesn’t.

“That’ll hold it until you can get to something less expensive than the ER. But go let them look at it. Fuck if I know what’s living on those rails.”

“I’m trying not to think about it too hard. Yay for tetanus shots, I guess.”         

“Yeah. Don’t test your luck. Doctor, I’m serious.”

“Yes sir,” she says. Frank snorts.

**

The next time he touches her, the pounding in her chest gets infinitely worse.   _He can’t love you._ He’s human, he’s complex, a hero and not, like her. But he’s also something else. The Punisher. _He can care, he can’t love._ He’s the Punisher, he has his war. _He can’t love you._

She doesn’t care.

**

What she needs to do, she ultimately decides, is take a step back and evaluate Frank. Her own issues be damned, she needs to look at him with a clear head. It’s her only hope of reigning herself in before it goes somewhere it shouldn’t. She needs to genuinely reconsider him, and everything he is: Vigilante. Traumatized. A man whose memory is spotty and whose behavior is compulsive. He kills easily. He enjoys war. He loves combat and the sound of gunfire and he feeling of fighting. His are not the actions of a sane man. He’s a felon. He’s distant until he’s not, whole pieces of his soul flooding out of him at once while he struggles to give voice to what’s left of himself. He’s as much the Punisher as he is a person.

But that thought throws her every time she tries to think him through—he _is_ still a person. He’s _Frank._ He loves dogs and shark week and does impressions. He likes spaghetti. 

Yes, he loves war. But he also loves poetry. He hides under a baseball cap and risks being recognized to go to libraries and book stores. He knows every shady diner in Manhattan. A few in Brooklyn. He never goes to Jersey.  He’s addicted to coffee.

He avoids sleep. He has nightmares.

He’s damaged, in his own words.

She’d once tried to put him in prison, just with a fairer sentence. She’d told him that he deserved it, and hadn’t been lying. He’s a criminal.

He disappears on weeks on end, and comes back with a body count. But she misses him when he’s gone.

 _This is not stepping back,_ she warns herself, her evaluation rapidly unravelling. _Be objective._

But Karen’s problem with everything—Frank Castle especially—is that she can’t look at _anything_ objectively. It’s damnable empathy. It’s that determination to dig. She _knows_ Frank as well as he sees her, and for every fact she throws up on the _Get ahold of yourself_ side of the _Get ahold of yourself V. Just let it happen_ scoreboard she keeps in her head, a less tangible knowing goes up, too. Frank is a killer. Frank is a good man. Frank is insane. Frank is honest and moral. Frank plays God. Frank does God’s job for him. How can she be objective when none of it adds up? Every comparison she makes is a zero-sum game. And if she remembers one thing, _one_ thing from ECON 1000, it’s that the only way to win a zero-sum game is not to play, unless you can live with the fact that the other side will lose everything.

So the real question she comes to, all her efforts at reasoning and evaluation spent, is this: which part of herself, in this game, is player two?


	21. Ghost

She wonders if he notices the little things. A glance held for a beat too long before a smile. Holding her breath when he gets too close. Hesitation as she pulls down his ripped jeans just far enough to expose the V of his hip, to inspect the laceration there—although, if he does notice that one, he probably assumes it’s because of the gore, which isn’t necessarily untrue. That he shifts a little—despite his incredible pain tolerance—as she tests the severity of it, running her thumb over his hip, studying the way the torn skin reacts, that it teaches her that he’s ticklish, or at least sensitive, is irrelevant. That she likes the look of his skin generally, peeking out from beneath his clothes, is irrelevant.

But she does notice it, and she wonders if he realizes. And she also wonders, despite herself, if noticing is why he doesn’t come back for two weeks after than night, and seems preoccupied when she sees him again.

Which is stupid, and childish. She knows better: Frank, if he’d picked up on this new kind of caring, would let it go unspoken until it faded away, unless he thought it wouldn’t. Then, she imagines, he’d tell her honestly what she already knows: that he can’t reciprocate, even if he wanted to. Or that, if he could, it would never amount to much—that there are limits to what he can feel and what he can love and what he can allow himself after losing so much.

 _Karen . . ._ she can hear the tone of voice he’d use in the confines of her head. And she can hear how she’d respond.

_It’s nothing, it’d just be . . . complicated. Don’t worry about it._

That would even be the truth—complicated is an excellent word. Which is why shouldn’t worry.

 _Don’t be stupid,_ she warns herself. _Not everything is about you._

What his reticence is about, then, she doesn’t know, and he doesn’t say. Karen doesn’t ask. She assumes he’ll tell her when he’s ready.

“Ready,” however, arrives another three weeks later, and takes her completely by surprise.

**

“Frank?”

It’s two in the afternoon and he shouldn’t even be awake, but here he is, risking a broad daylight sighting to slide into a seat across from her in the sandwich shop where she’s taking her lunch break. And that’s not the only unsettling part: Something in his face is all wrong. He’s looking everywhere, eyes blank, trying to be searching and failing. Karen has never seen him so encapsulate the thousand yard stare.

He shifts in his chair, his eyes shift in their sockets. They’re hidden by the shadow of his baseball cap. Karen leans across the table to look into them, seeking any indication of whether what’s gone wrong is contained only to his own head. She sets her sandwich down.

“Frank? What is it? What’s going on?”

Finally, he looks at her.

“I need your help.”

“Of course. What’s happening?”

“Nothing yet. There’s—in my unit, in Kandahar. There were stupid decisions—things we shouldn’t have done, leadership we shouldn’t have followed, things they told us not to do I did anyway. Shit I didn’t let the rest of them do when Schoonover stopped giving a dam—but we got out. All but one, we got out. Some of them I can account for—Schoonover, Micro . . . there was one I didn’t know. Heard he was dead in Pakistan. He’s not. He’s here, he’s back in the rear—bureaucrat lifer. Still making decisions, still sending people into the shit—still has a place in New York. No family. Lotta money. Maybe too much.”

Karen’s heart sinks into her stomach. He’s avoiding her eyes again.

“You think he might have been involved in Schoonover’s—”

“I think that piece of shit I knew wouldn’t let it go if I knew what they were doing. He’d have picked which witnesses could walk out.”

It goes unspoken but Karen hears it— _He’d have known which witnesses would be there._ That the Castles would be there. That he could have planned on the Castles being there. It would be Schoonover all over again: that haunting possibility that it wasn’t about the drugs.

“Oh God, Frank . . . “

He slams a hand down on the table, stares out the window with something ugly and desperate in his expression. She realizes for the first time, as the light from outside hits his face, that the circles under his eyes aren’t bruises.

“Thing is, I don’t know. And I can’t—I don’t kill cops. I don’t kill civilians. I don’t kill soldiers. That’s not what I do. I do that—it’s not me anymore. Not my rules. I don’t kill innocent people. I don’t kill bystanders.”

He’s being a touch too loud for such a public venue, and Karen begins to reach out to his hand. He snaps it back.

“Easy, Frank .  . .”

“Don’t tell me that. Don’t fucking tell me that. I can’t fucking sleep, I can’t—it won’t stop. This is the worst—it’s all cutting in and out. Memories I don’t want. Memories I do. Shit what I do is supposed to fix, it’s all fucking me over same as before—I gotta know. I gotta know if he’s guilty or not because petty criminals don’t mean shit until everyone who did this—they all did this, they all deserve what I do but—”

“But you can’t just let him get away.” _But you need a reason to kill him before he tells you something you can’t stand to know._

Frank’s jaw pops. He stares into the table. When looks up again his eyes are ice cold, endlessly distant, glazed.

“I need to know if he was involved.”

 _With having you executed._ “With the drugs.”

Karen knows already that it won’t matter what else she turns up— _drugs_ is all he wants to hear. That’s already what he chose. Her stomach turns.

“I’ll see what I can dig up.” _And so help you if I find anything._ If she does, if this man is the last road back to the truth that Frank had tried to blow to hell along with Schoonover, she won’t be able to lie to him about it. Karen is good at finding the truth. She doesn’t know the first thing about hiding it. Even if he didn’t want to hear it. Even if he couldn’t stand to. Even if it broke his heart.

**

As it turns out, Karen doesn’t have to worry about the truth, anyway. She realizes that immediately: there will be nothing she can confirm or deny out Frank’s old brother-in-arms based on what information she has access to. Half the time, she can’t even be sure of the man’s _location_. That Frank had heard he’d died in Pakistan isn’t surprising—that region is one of at least 15 where he’s worked in the last three years despite all rules of war and sovereignty suggesting it was somewhere he shouldn’t have been. He’d even been suspiciously near the UN following last year’s bombing. All she _can_ be sure of is that he isn’t in New York on a regular basis, and whether he kept in touch with anyone from his old unit is impossible to tell. She knows where she could find that information . . . if she had clearance that the Pentagon. Seeing as she doesn’t, he’s all but a dead end.

_< I’ve found all I can. There isn’t much> _

After two weeks of searching, she texts Frank to tell him. She knows that it might be a while before she sees him, otherwise. Lately, he’s been absent at best. All she can do to keep tabs on him is watch the news—which has been getting bloodier. She wonders if that’s helping him sleep, and tries not to keep count of how many people, how many lives—however wicked—it takes for him to feel peace.

Not that she doesn’t notice anyway: by the end of the month, he’s up to 72.

Still, she texts him.

_< How much is isn’t much?>_

_< I can’t confirm anything except to tell you he wasn’t in New York for most of the summer>_

He doesn’t respond right away. When her phone rings, it startles her.

“Frank?”

“Who was he talking to when he was here?”

“I don’t know. I can’t tell based on what I have. And unless you plan on breaking into the Pentagon itself I don’t know how much more I can give you. You said you knew someone who was good at computers? Maybe he can—”

“He already looked. I need to see whatever you have.”

Karen winces away from his tone. It’s so cold.

“Ok,” she says anyway, sounding at once tired and wary to her own ears, “I’m off work today and tomorrow. Come by whenever. But I’m warning you in advance—it isn’t much.”

Frank’s answer is terrible, hard and rough and unforgiving, like a muted shout. She knows it isn’t directed at her, not really, not any more than the words are. It still sends a chill through her heart.

“It’d better be enough.”


	22. Unraveling

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A MILLION YEARS LATER, hello, I'm back. Sorry about that! Life just happened all over everywhere. Obligations, writer's block, mental health, AO3 just not cooperating--you name it, there's a reason this took so long. BUT, I'm aiming to actually get it finished here very soon!!! Thanks for sticking with it.

He comes over that day. That evening. He comes at nightfall with bags under his eyes and a bag over his shoulder that hits the floor too heavily as he walks past to the kitchen table, leaving Karen standing in the doorway.

“What do you have?” he asks.

“Frank, I’m warning you . . .”

“Just show me.”

Karen sighs and moves to join him. Her laptop is on the table, sleeping, everything she has to show him ready to go. She sits across from him and guides him through what little she has, watching him more than the screen. Frank is as stoic as she’s ever seen him—as _dangerous_ as she’s ever seen him. He looks exhausted, the kind of tired that could shorten the longest of fuses.

“From what I can tell, there’s nothing we can do to prove anything either way. All I do know is that he is still on active duty.”

“Fuck . . . _Fuck.”_

Something wild moves into his glazed eyes.

“Frank, do you really think he was involved?”

“I don’t know. I still don’t know.”

“Then can you give him the benefit of the doubt?”

He shakes his head.

“Why not? Innocent until proven guilty, Frank.”

“You don’t understand—” he snaps, catching himself. Karen allows herself to glower at him for the outburst for just a moment before responding.

“Then tell me.”

He shakes his head, the motion carrying his head down, drawing his eyes to the table.

“Frank, don’t you lock me out.”

“I’m not.”

“Then tell me what’s wrong with you that you can’t let this go.”

“Like you don’t know, he grumbles, “you always fucking know.”

“Not unless you talk to me, I don’t . . . what is it? What is it you’re trying to do that his being alive won’t allow?”

He shakes his head, looks away, closes his eyes. Shakes it again.

“Frank.”

“Swim up.”

The words burst out of him though his attention is still somewhere far away.

“Swim?”

“Yeah. I’m—shit. I’m drowning, Karen. I can’t sleep I can’t think I can’t—,” _function, “_ it’s not fucking working anymore.”

Isn’t fixing him. The killing. His war. And if it isn’t healing him—or at least holding him together—then there’s no reason to fight it. That all falls into place in Karen’s mind smoothly, without incident. The next thought to follow it, though, is jarring. Jagged. It doesn’t want to fit in her brain. _If there’s nothing to distract him, does he have a reason to live at all?_

Suddenly terrified to desperate action, she spews half-assed solutions.

“ . . . Could you get him to confess without hurting him?” she offers.

Frank shakes his head violently, a stereotypic motion that seems less than voluntary.

“I don’t know. He knew me. He knows I wouldn’t.”

“But he doesn’t know if you’ve changed.”

“He’d know. He’d know I wouldn’t kill him unless I had to.”

 _What did you just say?_ Karen’s wandering gaze snaps up.

“I thought you _never_ killed soldiers, cops, or civilians?”

“I don’t.”

“ _Unless_? Frank."

"Yeah, unless. They were my family--shit, my kids. No one gets away with that. No matter who they are or what they can or can't prove."

Karen's heart skips a beat, lurching in her chest.

"You--you can’t mean to go after him without being sure? 100% sure. Frank, you can't--and even if he was involved, criminals are one thing, but you go after an active member of the military, and the police—the _government—_ they won’t ignore you anymore.”

“It doesn’t matter what they do to me. It won’t be worse than this.”

Karen swallows, and steels her expression.

“I refuse to believe this. You’re not a murderer, Frank. You don’t kill people without a reason—a real reason. You’re not thinking straight.”

He snorts, almost laughs. The sound is so bitter it chills Karen to the bone.

“You need to sleep, Frank.”

“ _How?”_

“Start by lying down. Don’t put your shoes on the couch.”

“I can’t stay here,” his voice turns to stone.

“Yes, you can. There’s no point in . . . you need to sleep.” There’s no point in killing when it doesn’t heal you. there’s no point in killing when you can’t enjoy it. Because that is what he is. Her stomach turns.

“Go lay down.”

Frank stands up, and shakes his head.

**

“Don’t you walk out that door, Frank. You aren’t yourself. Don’t go out there where you’ll be tempted to do something stupid. Please.”

“I don’t have a choice.”

“Yes! You do!” Karen finds herself shouting. “You can choose whether you are a vigilante or a murderer. You get to choose justice over revenge. You get to choose to spare innocent people, you do it every day. Don’t let this change that. Don’t let this take that away from you.” _That choice is all that’s left of yourself._ The only part that keeps the Punisher half-human.

Frank ignores her, reaching for the door.

“Don’t,” she hisses, trying to jump in front of him. Frank looks down at her, meets her eyes. His face is horribly cold. But his eyes—those are sad. As if he were mourning himself.

“And what if I don’t have a choice? What if I wait for proof and lose my chance? What if I force the truth out of him and he says he didn’t know only after I break all his fingers?”

“Then at least you won’t have killed him. Be sensible, Frank.”

He stares down at her for a long time, silent.

The door hits her roughly in the shoulder as he pulls it open and forces his way past her. She can’t possibly stop him—he’s too big, too determined, too senseless. But she says his name, she shouts it.

Frank just keeps walking.

“It’s really over if you do this,” she shouts. “There won’t be a third chance, Frank. If you do this, I’m done. You do this, and I am not on your side.” It’s a threat, and she means it. “You do this--!”

She can’t make herself shout the last part. But she whispers it:

“You do this, and I turn you in.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> GIVING CREDIT WHERE IT'S DUE: The "swimming up" concept and part of the line comes from Nathan Edmondson's run on Punisher, issue #1.


	23. Admission

For three days, she watches the news, waiting for the headline. _“Marine Doctor Found Dead” “Marine Doctor Missing from NYC Home.”_ She turns her phone over and over in her hand as she watches, waiting to make the call. Karen knows that she’ll have to act quickly once the news breaks to be heard over all the false reports.

It had occurred to her, that first night, that she could treat the story as any other news tip, publish everything she knows about why Frank should and should not have gone after his former teammate, tell the world that way. But that wouldn’t be honest. That wouldn’t be what she promised she would do, and if he’s gone this far, it might be more than he deserves.

After the first three days, she can’t take the wait, because three things, she realizes, are possible:

First, Frank could have gone after his target and been taken captive himself, handed off to God knows who.

Second, Frank might have killed him already, and hidden the body.

Three, somewhere, Frank is still holding him—torturing him for answers.

The second seems the least likely. A part of Karen believes that if Frank does kill an active duty serviceman, that he’ll come to his senses and turn himself in. As for the other two, the third wouldn’t explain why the doctor hasn’t been reported missing, but she prefers it, anyway, dreading the first.

None of them are great options, though, and anxiety crawls through he body with increasing severity until she has to call in sick to work, and admit to herself that she has to know. _Now._ She starts investigating for herself.

Karen knows better than to perform an obvious stakeout, so she less watches the doctor’s last known location than makes a point of breezing by it a few times a day, carting groceries, in her gym clothes, whatever setup makes her look like she has a reason for going up and down a residential street so many times in one afternoon. By evening, she’s losing hope.

She surrenders to the quieting of the street, and leaves, returning with her car. Under cover of darkness, she feels less conspicuous sitting in it, watching the place.

It’s 9:30 when someone strolls out of the apartment lobby, backlit by the light of the building behind him, with a silhouette reminiscent of a military uniform. It’s that silhouette which catches her attention—why he’d be wearing his uniform at all, she has no idea, but it’s distinctive enough to warrant something risky. As he strolls down the street, she turns her key in the ignition. The old car rumbles to life—the headlights with it.

Scowling, the man turns around to chastise her, via his expression, for having her high beams on while at a dead stop. She could care less, though, if he’s angry. Because she knows that face.

The doctor is alive.

The question, then, is whether Frank is, too.

**

_< I want to see you.>_

She’s not sure what answer she expects from the text, but any, any at all, would be good enough at this point. That Frank shows up on her doorstep that same night, though, is far more than she bargained for. Seeing his face is more of a relief than she has words for, the force of the feeling nearly knocking her off of her feet, the force of her heart slamming in her chest enough to make her feel like she's shaking.

“Frank?” she greets him, hurriedly opening the door. He looks exhausted, still, but not as glassy-eyed and far-away as he had the last time she’d seen him.

“You wanted to see me.”

“Oh—yeah, yeah. Come in.”

Frank steps inside, lingering by the door.

“Where have you been?” she asks.

“Jersey. Found another trafficking ring.”

“Did you--?”

“Every fucking one.”

Karen can only nod, swallowing back the next, unavoidable question, though it sticks in her throat despite her.

“Did it,” she nearly whispers, “help?” _Did it feel good again?_

_Can you keep loving it?_

He seems to consider her question, searching her with those liquid brown eyes that make her heart hammer all the harder. She wants so badly, for a moment, to reach out and touch him. To take his hand, anything, just to let him know that she’s here.

“Enough,” he says.

“Enough that you can keep doing it.”

He nods, once. “You say that like you’re relieved.”

“I am. I know—” _what it is to you,_ “what it does for you. And without it . . . I was worried.”

“For me, or what I’d do?”

“Both.”

Frank shakes his head.

“Why do you care so damn much?” It's not the first time he's asked, but there is an edge to his voice this time that makes the question feel urgent and new, a kind of defensive irritation, and all the sudden, the words are on her tongue.

She knows she shouldn’t say them. _He can’t love you. The Punisher can’t love anything—_

But there they are, whispering out of her.

“Because the kind of love I hold onto and don’t let go isn’t with the people who bring the pain, Frank. It’s with the ones I trust to know me.” She waits, watching his brows furrow, his mind working over the reference. That conversation feels so long ago, now. But his eyes alight all the same, and she knows he’ll remember.

“And,” she continues, knowing that’s she can’t come back from it, unable to stop herself, though the words _are_ barely more than a whisper, “I didn’t want you to make me let _you_ go.”

Karen’s heart stops—skips a beat—as the words leave her mouth, even her pulse afraid to move until she’s sure he’s caught her meaning. For a long moment, there is nothing but frustration in his face, and then his eyes widen—and she knows that he knows exactly what she meant.

 


	24. Consummation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you ALL so, so much for reading and commenting and prompting me along the way. Special thanks, though, go to BlueberryRK--thank you for inspiring me to work on this again!!! (I hope you enjoy the ending!)

For a beat, there is nothing. Frank stares at her with eyes that aren’t even wide, just far, far, far too bright. His expression is utterly stricken. And Karen knows oh so well that she has gone too far.

Frank’s mouth falls open.

“Say something,” she whispers, when words don’t follow. Frank looks her over.

“Shit,” he whispers.

“Frank—”

“ _Shit.”_

He turns away. A small, quarter turn. In the direction of the door. _No._

_Oh, no._

She’s realized this could happen, had all but seen it coming, but to have it realized before her eyes—

Karen’s legs turn to air. To jelly. To water. She remains standing through some force utterly unrelated to her own natural structural integrity, held aloft, perhaps, by the force of the implosion happening in her chest.

She can’t look away from the back of his head. His retreating back. She stares into him, helpless, unbreathing, frozen in a moment that feels eternal—though it’s far from.

In fact, it takes less than a second.

Frank turns toward the door for the exact length of a heartbeat. Long enough for half of his name to slip from her lips.

“Frank . . .”

He whirls around, “fuck,” punctuating the motion, and he fixes her eyes with his. Wild, wild eyes. Frank Castle’s eyes. Lost and overwhelmed and straining for a foothold. _He can’t love you and stay sane._ Frank Castle’s liquid brown eyes, drowning her in a stare. _The Punisher only loves his war—_

He tastes like nothing in particular.

Like mouth tastes. Lips taste. Frank taste.

This is the first thing that registers in Karen’s mind about the kiss.

How it happened, that after he turned he paused for a fraction of a second with that look in his eyes, and that, after that, his hands had risen in a rush to cradle her face, and that he’d fallen over her, coming close and leaning down, surrounding her in so many ways with his body so large and so close and his hands consuming her fragile face, are things she understands only retroactively. That occur to her only as he threatens to withdraw and her arms wrap around his neck to drag him back down. As his palms close over her hips and drag her body unrelentingly to his. Thigh to chest to mouths, they collide—they synthesize.

Frank’s arms sneak around her waist. One palm races up her spine to the back of her neck, holds her there, close. Intense. Pulling her into the kiss like an invitation to consume him. And she does.

**

How long they gasp at each other she doesn’t know, but his hands are under her shirt and her hair is ruined and she’s pulling him by his vest, leaving his lips to swell between kisses to which she earnestly applies her teeth, when his hand slips down the back of her thigh and his fingers drive into the thick muscle there. His lips drag down to her neck. The other hand follows the first, tracing the opposite leg. And then he lifts her. Karen swings her legs around his hips as he hoists her from the floor, her body weight momentarily yanking him forward before he can straighten and move them, albeit haphazardly, still lost in the skin of her neck.

Karen falls backwards into her bed, and drags him with her.

Frank comes down with his knee driving between her legs, pressing an arch into her back and a soft exclamation that coincides with the suction sound of his lips pulling a bruise into her neck. She clutches him to her by his vest.

She can’t figure out how it fastens. Karen works over it for a while before his hand comes up to help her. It’s the only thing they remove for many kisses more, the skull staring back at her as they cast it together to the floor. But she slides her hands beneath his shirt. Traces musculature she’s touched so many times before in passing, seeks out scars she helped to heal. Finds how well her fingers fit along the ridgeline of his shoulder blades.

The shirt doesn’t last all that long, after that, and it’s another five, ten, countless kisses along his bare shoulder, his thumb tracing her bra wire beneath her blouse, before the press of his thigh between her legs turns urgent, before his lips freeze against hers and he pulls away by a few deplorable inches.

“You sure you want this?” he asks, voice all husky gravel. _This._ Not just the sex. Them.

_He can’t love you. Not all the way._

But she can love him.

“Yes,” she gasps between hard, insistent kisses, lifting her head to reach him. “God, Frank. Yes.”

She re-situates herself further back on the bed and pulls him with her. She helps him peel her from her clothes.


	25. Lovesongs

“Karen,” he breathes, sitting up in the dark. He’s stayed too long already, he’s looking at his vest on the floor—

“I know.”

There are no other words. There never have been. _I know._

She knows what this has meant to them—she knows it doesn’t change anything. He’s leaving after this, even if he doesn’t really look like he wants to. And he’ll be back, he won’t run from her. This mattered. But he _will_ go, first. He’ll disappear into the night and the next time she sees him, when she greets him by kissing him, he may be bleeding. There will be something metallic about the taste of his fingers in her mouth.

He will kiss her as if doing so could re-anchor him to the world. He will treat her like a godsend.  He will smell like gun oil.

He’ll give himself mind, body and soul. There will be blood under his fingernails.

He will adore her, but memory and battlefield will pull him back by his heartstrings. Wind them tight. Twist them up so that when he reaches for her, it will be with both hands tied behind his back. With something dark and inevitable whispering in his ear, calling him ever homeward.

Karen _knows._ She always has.

And as she lies awake, watching him pull on his clothes, his vest, and sling his bag over his shoulder, as she listens to the rhythm of the rain that has begun outside the window, she imagines gunfire. She looks at him and hears shells hitting pavement, bright, clear sounds.  Hears the rattle of firearms chewing through ammunition, his only remaining love song.

_I know._

Karen makes her way across the room, a blanket wrapped around her, to kiss Frank Castle one more time tonight before The Punisher goes to war.

 

 

 


End file.
